The Joe Rogan Experience - #1875 - Dave Smith

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Dave Smith is a stand-up comedian, Libertarian political commentator, and podcaster. He's the host of the "Part of the Problem" podcast, as well as a co-host of the podcasts "Legion of Skanks" and "Yo! MMA Wrap." www.comicdavesmith.com

the Joe Rogan experience but that's good yeah I think that's what makes you so good at what you do yeah the last thing you want to do is be like super confident and wrong yeah right exactly you want to at least be always questioning, like always maintaining that possibility. I could be wrong about everything. When you start, when you go over stuff, like when you talk about libertarian ideas and you look at the way the government is run now,

do you run through that thought process? Like maybe the only way to do it is the way that we're doing it right now. Yeah, I try my best to always do that. I mean, I'm guilty of not now. Yeah. I try my best to always do that. I mean, I'm guilty of not doing it, but I try my best to always be like, okay, well, maybe theoretically they know something I don't know, which kind of means like this is the best way to do it. Or maybe I'm just wrong and my theoretical model couldn't work and this is the best,

but that try to give like the toughest arguments against it and then go like, okay, but we still didn't need to kill a million Iraqis. You know what I mean? We still didn't need to do this. Or we still at least didn't need to. But I try my best. It's dangerous because the further into it I get, the more convinced I am that I'm right. And then that's also dangerous because I'm not as insecure about it as I used to be. It feels like the only way, like the system is broken.

Everyone sort of agrees that. And the only way to do it right would be to create a more ethical, moral, logical system that's actually based on constitutional rights and how the government is supposed to be in terms of like the kind of power they're supposed to have versus what they're always constantly trying to acquire but if you did that how much would you have to blow the system up and how would we run things like what period of vulnerability would we have while we're trying to reestablish a new system and how would we know if the system could even work correctly without being influenced by money and power and all the shit that's fucked it up for what we've got right now. It's a daunting challenge.

I think that, like what Ron Paul used to always say was basically, I mean these are my words, not his, but it was basically his plan was he goes, end all the worst shit first. Like end all the most evil shit first. So the first thing is like stop bombing third world countries stop locking people in jail for victimless crimes stop doing like stop bailing out billionaires and corporations and stuff like stop that first you know you don't you don't start with like well

okay if there's a vulnerable population that's like dependent on this government program get rid of it tomorrow you know so like try you try to do that and then the more of the corruption that you roll back you're gonna see let you know like less wealth being extracted from regular American people and go into special interests kind of build that up over time but it's a challenging thing to go back to go from this insane system to something less insane right is tough and throughout human history usually it's a there's a pretty rough period Sure there. It's usually not a smooth transition. Well. It's kind of fascinating. We think that this is the only country that has been

Really established as like a colony that went on to take over the world and it did it inside of 300 years Which is pretty fucking wild yeah, that's the most wild part is the time the time span It's pretty crazy because going from being a republic to an empire has happened before but we're the most powerful Empire in world history at least in terms of like raw power right like the technology the level of wealth all that shit and we we did in a very short time and Some of the most unexceptional people are the ones who want to run it, which is so weird. When you see the squad, did you see that debate that she was having with those bankers where they were talking about eliminating fossil fuels? She made me root for the bankers, Joe. I was rooting for the bankers.

It is quite a feat to get me to say, I think the head of Goldman Sachs is making a good point. To get me to say, you know, I think the head of Goldman Sachs is making a good point. Imagine that she was dangling the carrot of the $10,000 we gave back in student loan debt forgiveness, that those people are going to have bank accounts, and those people that got that free money are going to take that free money out of your bank account. That was the immediate thing that she dangled, which lets you know some of the incentive involved in giving student loan debt It's not really that we want to help these people It's that now we will have influence over those people for voting Oh, this was clearly like just throwing a carrot like pre-midterm elections

How about only $10,000? How about all of it? If you're going to really absolve student loan debt If someone's $700,000 in the hole or whatever What's like worst case scenario? If someone goes to med school and someone gets a PhD. Oh, yeah, if they do all of that, probably $300,000, $400,000 at least. Yeah, and then it compounds with interest over the decades. Like I was reading this story about this woman who took out $150,000 in student loans and she hasn't been able to pay them back.

And now she's $250,000 in the hole. Yeah, geez. And they're the most vicious type of loans too. Of course. Like it's easier to get type of loans, too. Of course. It's easier to get out of credit card debt. You can't even get out through bankruptcy. People are having their Social Security docked. People who've made it to the end of life.

They're relying on government assistance, right? It's essentially government assistance that we pay for. And they're getting that docked to pay for student loan debt. Yeah, it's such a fucked up system. Like,ed to pay for student loan debt yeah it's such a it's such a fucked up system like i'm completely against student loan debt just i um you know forgiving the debt just because i think it's like it's it's just you're just punishing the taxpayers for the the debt of um in many cases a more privileged group It's like the people who didn't go to college now have to bail out the people who did. But, man, it is such a fucked up system that they trap these 18-year-old kids into signing up. And that no one at the colleges even.

Like the fact – I mean obviously the politicians are like soulless and the bankers are just trying to make money, but that no one in the university ever has the basic human decency to look at one of these kids who goes, hey, you know you're spending $150,000 on a gender studies major? Just think about that. Think about whether or not this is really a good idea. They just go, oh, okay, we'll take the money. No problem. What they're hoping is they're going to get a job in a university.

Right. It's a Ponzi scheme, basically. You'll teach this to other people until no one's signing up for this anymore. You'll learn useless shit that isn't even true, and then you'll teach it to other people who want to learn this useless shit to teach it to other people, and let's just hope we keep

getting new investors into this thing until it all goes belly up. And what's really wild is then most, especially tech companies, they're so progressive and so liberal, and they're kind of trapped in that ideology, which can hamper what they want to do and what they're allowed to do with their company, because you get activists who are employees.

So your employees become, and they go straight from universities where they're indoctrinated into this ideology. And then they permeate these tech companies. And some of them are fucked. Some of them are realizing it. And they're pushing back. And they go, stop, stop, stop. You guys are killing our stock.

You're fucking up the business. It's a giant loss in terms of whether or not it's good for the overall company. It's a giant loss for some of them. Like Netflix. Yeah. Netflix took a giant loss for some of them. Like Netflix. Yeah. Netflix took a giant hit after all that Chappelle shit. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. And if you think about with the tech censorship stuff, if you think about in 2014, 2015, this basically didn't exist. This isn't that long ago that you kind of could say whatever you wanted to.

Yeah, I'll have a little bit. Thank you kind of could say whatever you wanted to. Yeah, I'll have a little bit. Thank you. You could say whatever you wanted to on Twitter. I mean, I remember like really wild people saying crazy shit on Twitter and there was never even a thought like, oh, you're going to get kicked off for saying this. It was just like, that's the internet. That's Twitter. That's Twitter. YouTube. You could say what you wanted to.

Twitter has hardcore porn. Well, that's the other thing that's very weird about what is allowed and what's not allowed. Which I'm for. I don't think, I'm not saying that they should censor hardcore porn. If you want to follow a porn star and they want to post pictures of them fucking and videos of them fucking. Yeah, I don't care. Who cares?

Well, I just, I also, yeah, I'm completely against any of the censorship. I think it's an awful slippery slope to go down. It's a giant slippery slope and it shouldn't be navigated by people who are again Indoctrinated into the system that they get straight out universities, and they're they're locked into these progressive ideas Yeah, but the I agree with all that but I mean so the point I was just making is when you talk about like the bottom line so you could see why Originally back then why they weren't kicking people off of their platforms is because like well There's no incentive for them to kick people off the platform the whole point is they want people to be on their

platform there'd certainly be no incentive to kick like really popular people off of their platform that's how they get people in onto their platform and it is there is a lot of truth to the fact that a lot of these kids coming out of the universities came in with this woke ideology, but there was also tremendous pressure from the top coming down. So what really, really sparked all of that was in 2016 once Trump won, and then Congress hauled all the heads of the big tech companies in front of Congress and basically threatened the shit out of them that like, look, Donald Trump won, and here's why he won. He won because of fake news and Russian

interference in social media and so you guys got to do something to crack down on them and you see that to this day did you see uh Alex Berenson like shared the evidence I mean he was able to get back on Twitter through that lawsuit but he shared that that the White House specifically asked about Alex Berenson yeah we said why are they still on? We read it. We read the quotes and who quoted them on the podcast. Now, technically speaking, they didn't say kick Alex Berenson off of Twitter. What are you doing about it? But they did go, what are you doing? It's like this mafia shit almost.

So that's, you know, I guess you could kind of say it's not exactly a violation of the First Amendment because they just asked. But it's kind of like someone robbing you by just asking for your money in an aggressive way. Another more important point. He was right. That is pretty important. This is a very important point, which is why he's

back on. He was citing studies. He was using the Israeli data. He was talking to scientists that were willing to go outside of the company line. And there's quite a few of them. These are legit people. So what he was getting in trouble for with the government was being correct, which is really crazy because you're talking about a health pandemic.

So you're talking about decisions that could possibly either save people's lives, ruin people's lives, save people's health, ruin people's health. The only way you're going to know what's what is if you get accurate data. So if there's a guy who's talking about data, but the data is inconvenient to whatever the narrative is, if it's because it's inconvenient because the pharmaceutical companies fund 75% of all the ads on television, and how many campaigns? And how much money do they have invested in this? And does the government actually have a piece of the Moderna vaccine? Isn't that?

Well, there was. So Rand Paul, I don't know if you saw one of these moments where he, it was months ago now, but where he was grilling Fauci in one of those Rand Paul versus Fauci moments. And he said that they found out through a Freedom of Information Act that it was something like $135 million in royalties had been paid out to scientists on the NIH, at the NIH from pharmaceutical companies. And he asks Fauci straight up, he goes, have you received any money? Will you disclose all the money you've received?

And Fauci, in a roundabout way, you know, was like, well, Dr. Paul, I think I may have had one royalty for very small money, but now I don't need, the law doesn't require me to reveal that. So I'm like, hmm. Don't you think, like, shouldn't we know that? Shouldn't we at least be able to know, like, how much money does Fauci make from Pfizer and Moderna? Because that seems like a tiny conflict of interest. A giant conflict of interest. A giant conflict of interest. But to your point with Alex Berenson stuff, like, look, even if he was wrong, which he was right a lot more than he was wrong. Put his track record up against Fauci's track record over the last couple of years. He was right way more than Fauci was.

But even if he was wrong, theoretically, he was making data based arguments. Yeah. Like he wasn't like, you know, they justified like tech censorship with like, well, what if someone's just like a Nazi preaching hate? Or what if someone's spreading, intentionally spreading false information to change an election? But he wasn't doing any of that. No. He was just like a guy who worked for the New York Times. He was just a guy who was presenting sound arguments.

Even if he got some things wrong, the idea that we would shut that down is a really creepy, very creepy thing. And then that it's coming from the White House, that it's coming directly from them. This isn't just like some random, you know, like it's not just that, oh, there's a company with a woke ideology who doesn't think you should be allowed to do this on their platform. Like the kind of almost the libertarian argument that some people make, well, they're a private company. They can do what they want to do. But that's not what's happening here. Here you have the government who's saying silence our number one critic to our policies

of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all this stuff. Right. And they also affected that Hunter Biden story. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, wasn't that pretty incredible, dude, what Zuckerberg said to you? thing what and what i mean wasn't that pretty incredible dude what zuckerberg said to you i mean it was look he you asked him about the hunter biden story yeah and his first response to you was well here's what happened the fbi told us there was going to be this this misinformation this russian misinformation coming now i'm not saying the fbi told him specifically you have to

turn down the Hunter Biden story. But when you asked him about the Hunter Biden story, the first thing he said was, well, the FBI. So clearly, at least he took it that way. And then when the story came out, the FBI and the CIA and all these intelligence people are saying this has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. And Joe Biden's bragging about this at the time. So if nothing else, they at least clearly sent a signal to these companies that, like, this is the one. This is what we were talking about. Now, could you imagine if you're these people at Facebook?

What do you do? Like, if you get that phone call or whatever it is, email, probably a fucking person-to-person meeting when they put your phone in a basket right really what is it what is it like and what do you do and do you go into a deep dive and try to find out what's legit and what's not legit do you go and interview the people from the new york post that wrote the article what do you do yeah it's it's it's a weird situation where they're kind of asking you to have this level of expertise in a thing that is not your area of expertise. Or do you just have some faith in the system and go, well, I mean, this is the FBI telling me this. And if they're saying it's Russian misinformation,

then I don't want to put it out there if that could affect the results of an election. And so maybe you err on that side. Right. Imagine if it is. Imagine if you've been warned and then it is Russian disinformation, but you also allow people to share it and it turns out to actually affect the election. Yeah. Well, that swings the election the other way. Trump wins again. And then we find out it's a hoax and we find out he really is in cahoots with Russia. That was the big fear, right? And that's not a narrative that you didn't hear like you you heard constantly he was in bed with russia you heard constantly russia had stuff on him russia has this russia has that

he did this people peed on him yeah that was the steel dust yeah right and and no matter and and there's an interesting thing like that because and there's there's polling to that shows this like i forget exactly what it is but it's a very large percentage of democrats uh democrat voters still believe donald trump was in bed with Russia, even though the investigation found no evidence that there was any conspiracy or anything like that. And in fact, anyone paying attention to it, the whole thing was just completely orchestrated to box Donald Trump in. Yeah.

Again, I'm not a Trump supporter if anyone needs that disclaimer, but I'm just saying objectively he was framed for treason, essentially for being a traitor to his country, working with Russia involved in a conspiracy to change the election results of 2016. Also, and then there was no public apology once the investigations were over. There was no exoneration publicly. No, they just kind of, in the last year of his administration, stopped talking about it as much, never basically acknowledged that we had been saying Trump-Russia collusion for all this time. After the report fell apart, they moved immediately over to

the Ukraine gate thing, which is very interesting given the context of everything going on now. And then they just pulled it up again in the presidential election of 2020 when this laptop came out, and they were like of 2020 when this laptop came out. And they were like, oh, this is Russia again. Seems like that old thing.

And it worked. The thing is, there is Russian disinformation, right? There's that, too. Yeah. How the fuck do you know if your Twitter or Facebook, and I'm not exonering them for what they did, right? They shouldn't have done it. I don't believe in censorship, especially when it comes to censoring a story that's from the second oldest newspaper in the fucking country. It's kind of crazy. Like they're, they're journalists, right? Whatever you might think of the New York Post

and their funny headlines, they're essentially journalists. When they print something like this, like you're supposed to like think first about where is it coming from? Think first about, like, what's the ramifications of censoring this? What if it's accurate? I don't think anybody thought that. I think the orange man scared the fuck out of everybody, and they all acted irrationally. And I think that's one of the things that broke mass media, mainstream media, in terms of, like, television media and news. And it was just this hate for Trump was

So overwhelmed like you had to say that he was bad no matter what the story was He pissed off a lot of people in a in an unbelievable way But he also I mean he really pissed off people in like the intelligence agencies and people at very high levels For a bunch of different reasons. But like that stuff, it's like the same thing with the Alex Berenson thing. It's like, OK, but then you censored that story and you turned out to be wrong and they turned out to be right. Right. They were telling the truth. And so now while you in theory may have been correcting for this one mistake, which was a Russian misinformation could sway an election, what ended up happening was that the intelligence community interfered in the election and that they did not allow this story. The intelligence agencies and big tech interfered in the 2020 election. They silenced this story, which was a newsworthy story,

no matter how much weight you put into it, whether it's, is it the, should it change your vote that the son of the president, then former vice president is clearly selling his last name for political, you know, his, his political influence to make money from foreign governments. I don't know how much you, how big a deal you should think that is, but that is a story. That's something that if someone broke that, that's a story there. And then there were questions about what did Biden know about this? Was he getting kickbacks from that? The Bobulinski, something like that, I think, was Hunter Biden's partner. He testified or not testified, but he was interviewed by the FBI.

We just found this out last month that he was interviewed by the FBI and told them this, told them that, yes, I've met with Joe Biden several times. He knew about all these business dealings. Well, Joe Biden is claiming I've never talked to my son about his business. This is at least worthy to print this story and to have Twitter shut down one of the biggest newspapers in the country and then and then like make it so you couldn't share the link and and then Facebook, as Zuckerberg said, I don't know, lowered the signal in a significant way, I think was the way he put it. I don't remember what he said, the way he said it. But essentially he admitted that there's some complex shadow banning type mechanism that's in place for information.

And fucking the whole thing is so complicated. And I do not envy them at all. Imagine being someone at Facebook and the FBI tells you that. Or being someone at Twitter. What the fuck are you supposed to do? Tell the FBI to go fuck itself? Do you know how fucking scary that would be? Yeah.

Yeah. And even if you look at the way that the Congress talked to him when they hauled him in front of Congress several times. I mean, they like really kind of shake him down. Yeah. They're like, what are you doing about this? What are you doing about that? How are you making sure that, and imagine the task of making sure, you create a platform where people can speak to each other,

and you now have the task of making sure they're all being honest. Yeah. Like, how the fuck do you do that? How the fuck do you do that? It's an insane thing. And I really do think that, obviously, there's costs everything but the only obvious like like human answer here is like well look we believe in the spirit of free speech or we don't like people can say things and then if you believe in democracy which everyone claims to right they all say the reason they hate trump is because he denied

democracy or he's a threat to democracy well then then you have to believe in the ability of voters to make a determination for themselves of what's what. And if they can't, then the whole project doesn't work anyway. But they're like, these people, we've been lying to them for so long, they're so dumb, we can't let them run things. We can't let them just vote, just regular vote.

Well it's like I see people up here, because all the people who are selling the war in Ukraine right now and how we have to send more weapons in and we have to crack down harder on Russia and be more involved in the war it's like all the same people who sold the war in Iraq I mean not all of them but a whole bunch of them are like the exact same people just people go war yeah and you're like you and those same people were complained about misinformation and they're like the ones who sold the war in Iraq and then they go okay remember how i told you that saddam hussein was in bed with osama bin laden and he had nukes

that he was gonna detonate in kansas well let me tell you what's going on now you're like how do you get to tell me what's going on now how are you even here this is precisely what they warned about like when when eisenhower gave that speech it's precisely what he was warning about. We're warning about undue influence and that there's a whole business behind war now. Right. And they want to go to war. So Eisenhower basically said that during World War II, we built up this arms industry that has never been built up before. And now you have these companies and that's he coined the term the military industrial complex and you see this all over the place in in washington dc man there are

like these think tanks that get funded by the weapons manufacturers and then those think tanks come up with pieces about why we need to go fight a war and then they go and lobby the politicians to support some other war. It's like It's it's yeah, it's something out of like a crazy movie and you could see that same thing in response to disease Oh, yeah, exactly the pharmaceutical companies get involved the response disease is always their pharmaceutical products It's never Lifestyle and health changes what's one of the one of the best videos of Fauci is early on before the pandemic kicked off, where he's saying, just lose weight. You don't need a mask. It's not going to work. Just don't drink. Don't smoke. Try to take care of yourself. That's the most important thing.

Where did all that go? Well, that's not convenient to pharmaceutical companies. And it's also lumping everybody physically into the same boat in the same category of risk is so crazy and that's what's really freaking people out because they're trying to do it to little children because they're trying to do that now to little children when there's significant risk of myocarditis it's a real thing we know we know it's a thing these goddamn commercials that you see where they're talking about little kids and myocarditis on television like when when was that an issue? You're trying to pretend that this was an issue before?

This was not an issue that you needed to advertise on television, the risk of myocarditis in children and just give them some medicine and then they're going to grow up and be happy and healthy. You don't even fucking know that because you don't know the extent of the heart damage. You don't know that. There was another clip of Fauci. It was during the lockdown regime before Operation Warp Speed. So before before the vaccine regime when we were still in the, maybe we could get a vaccine and that'll get us out of these lockdowns. And he was like, no, no, no, because even if we got a vaccine, it would take at least two years of trials before we would know whether this vaccine was safe. And then sometimes vaccines can have a negative effect where actually you're

worse at fighting off the the virus afterward and he kind of breaks down this whole thing then then all of a sudden once operation warp speed starts and then once biden gets in you're not allowed to talk about that anymore and in fact when i was on with you was a couple times ago it was the clip that we went that you got like all this this heat for in and Fauci even responded, and essentially what you were saying was like, hey, if you're a young person, just be really healthy. That's my advice to you. Eat healthy, exercise, get a lot of sunlight,

get vitamin D, like all these things. And that became like a controversial statement. There is, all of the science backs that up, that that is absolutely excellent advice. But it had nothing to do with science at that point. It was a narrative. This is what's going to get us out of this horrible thing we're in now. Take it.

And everybody had to take it. And if you didn't take it, there was all this crazy nonsense. Like, first of all, they knew in the beginning that it wasn't going to stop infection. They knew. Burke said that. She said that now. I should have said that before. She said that. I knew that it wasn't going to prevent infection. They knew that Burke said that. She said that now. I should have said that before. She said that I knew that it wasn't going to prevent infection.

She said like we oversold it a little or something like that. I don't know what she said, how she said it. But that was known back then. And it's also, if you talk to virologists about respiratory illnesses, you can't contain them. about respiratory illnesses. Like, you can't contain them. You do your best. Like, can you stop yourself from getting it? Yeah, if you completely isolate from humanity and you stay on a ranch and you never leave

and you get your own well water and you wait this bitch out, that's possible. You could do that. But other than that, if you're going to be in contact with human beings, and especially something that you can spread before you know you have it, which apparently is the case.

Like people could have a mild form of it and be spreading it and then other people can die from it. And you might not be affected by it at all, but the other people that get it might die. And so that was the big fear. Right. And everybody was like, if you are irresponsible at this point, you're contributing to this horrible situation. I get that but why didn't we put that same sort of? the same sort of focus and And same sort of pressure on people to take care of their health because that makes a big fucking difference a giant

Difference as big as anything yeah is whether or not you're healthy and you have a robust immune system that can fight off any kind of Infection not just this one, but all the ones that people get constantly and die from. I mean, there's fucking in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 50,000 people every year die from the flu, right? Isn't it something crazy like that? Yeah, depending on the season. Yeah, yeah. What about that?

Are we just going to do the same lockdown thing for everything now? Like, what are we going to do when diseases come? Is 50,000 okay, but 500,000 is bad? And out of those 500,000, how many of them were fat? How many of them were old? How many of them had four comorbidities, which is the average? Four comorbidities of people that died from it? Yeah.

This is wild shit. Yeah. And it's been, and this has been true way before COVID in America. It's something like, according to the CDC, there was something, I think it was between like 66 and 70 percent of medical costs are associated with preventable illness. So whether it's obesity, smoking, you know, drugs, you know, what all this like unhealthy lifestyle type stuff. And then, you know, we have like these debates over like Obamacare and all these other things. And none of that ever comes up. Like no one ever brings up the fact that like, well, if we actually want to have a solution to the health problem in this country, well, we kind of know what the solution is. Solution is to like eat good and exercise and things like

this and don't do drugs and don't, uh, or at least the unhealthy ones don't smoke cigarettes, you know, that's kind of the solution. And no one ever seems to be like, well, we're asking the people to do this. I'm not, I'm certainly not advocating forcing anyone to do anything, but you could at least mention that. Well, you know, I mean, you could find a world in which that would be encouraged, where it could be encouraged in a positive way. And it would really literally change people's lives. Like they would start doing it and start feeling better and then that would become a new way of life for them. And then they would look back a year, two, three years from now with so much more energy and so much healthier

and feel so much better and go, God, why didn't someone tell me this earlier? And that's a thing. That's a real thing that we can do. It's just such a fucking fascinating time to watch people's thought processes and how Quickly people are to join the herd mentality and to not question things especially the people that put all their faith in some of the

Companies that have been shown to be the most deceptive and profited the most from that Deception and have been penalized even though they've been penalized financially, if you look at the gain versus loss, it's not even a slap on the wrist because they were still allowed to make billions of dollars from pharmaceutical medications that killed millions of people. Yeah. Or at least thousands of people. Yeah, and then they're just doing math.

They're like, okay, well, we pay this $5 billion fine, but we make $40 billion in profits. That's what Abramson said when I had John Abramson on, who's a guy who's litigated against pharmaceutical companies in the Vioxx case. He got the internal memos where they said there's going to be all these complications, but we will do well. Like they knew the health complications that were going to be associated with this medication that wound up killing at least 50,000 people, which is fucking wild. And they made like 12 billion. They got penalized a few billion.

And so they made profit. They made profit off of a disease, which they they pushed through knowing that they were hiding data. Yeah, it's fucking. And then people were willing to trust them. And then, you know, when you look at like things like when they had these covid passports and all of these big cities there, you know, the thing that's so crazy is like so then they go, OK, so the government is basically forcing you to consume this pharmaceutical product or you can't participate in the society that you live in. And then all these people get forced into it. It's clear as day that this did nothing.

I mean, they put the vaccine passports into effect in New York City before the Omicron variant. And when Omicron came through, it just wiped through them. Everybody got Omicron in the city. It was like the most contagious variant. It did nothing to stop this. And then ultimately it was like so obvious

and the people just weren't having it. So they pulled back on it. But then there's no admission that like, oh, we got that wrong. There's no reconciliation, no correction. But the pharmaceutical companies, they kept all the money for all the people who were forced to consume their product.

Well, not only that, they have zero risk. Right, completely protected from liability. Many of them got funding from the government for the development in Operation Warp Speed. So yeah, it's a pretty sweet gig. Look, whenever there's a pandemic or whenever there's a new thing, there's a crisis, there's always going to be mistakes made.

And it's whether or not we learn from those mistakes and whether or not you have a healthy distrust for narratives that are being pushed by people who have a financial incentive for these narratives to be correct. Here's another one we don't talk about. Respirators. Do you know how many people died because they were on respirators?

And is it a correlation or is it a causation? Well, they don't fucking use them as much anymore. That's a fact. And 88% of the people in New York, they put on, something like that? Find out what percentage of people got put on respirators and wound up dying. And then you could say, well, they were going to die anyway. And that's why there's some people that disagree with that. And they say, no, you blew out these people's lungs. Well, the reason I tend to, I think that you're right to disagree with that is because what you

said is that the, so at the beginning, right, this is when Cuomo, when he was still a governor, there was demanding that Trump send in 50,000 more respirators because we needed them or people are going to die. And then the doctors basically all from the bottom up determined like, we're not going to be putting these people on respirators anymore because there are so many of them are dying. Most New York COVID patients on ventilators died. Yeah. Rose to 88% of those who received mechanical ventilation. Among the 2,634 patients whom outcomes were known the overall death rate was 21% but it rose to 88% for the ones who were ventilated Jesus Christ so even just that so let's just pretend it's only what is that 67% imagine that

yeah just that 67% well that's a lot of fucking people dying. And, and this one to your point though, I would say, I don't think there was anything like malicious about this. I do think doctors were trying to save people and then they quickly started realizing our patients are doing really bad when we put them on these ventilators and then they backed off and they were like, let's not do this anymore. So to your point, yeah, like mistakes will be made. And I think that one was like an honest mistake. But the point is that at least the doctors then corrected that. Right. And then went, OK, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to wait until that we absolutely need to to put them on these ventilators.

But there seems to be with all of these other like like major policies from the federal government and from a lot of these state governments that there's just kind of, you know, there's like no admission, no recognition. And I mean, I remember like when when Texas here, when when you guys first opened back up and just ended all of the COVID restrictions, all the blue state governors were saying this is so reckless and insane and people are going to die. And then the death rate was no worse than in any of these other blue states. And now they all stopped. Yeah.

And they don't even acknowledge it. Everyone who wants a point to Florida, like Florida, what they did, they had the highest rate of death in COVID. Yeah, but they have the oldest people. And if you age adjust, it's no different than California. Yeah, that's right. If you age adjust, that was the right way to do it. He was right. Like, it's not, no one's saying that COVID's good.

It was not good. But these people that did things that were not good for society, were not good for small businesses, were not good for people's mental health, were not good for the development of children's language skills. Like all these things were wrong, man. Well, look, I mean, there's so much stuff. It's going to be like a generation before we even see the damage from the lockdowns. And we won't even be able to know for sure what exactly, like trace it back to what exactly was the damage from the lockdowns. But just think about what a nightmare, you know, 2020. I mean, there were riots in that year that were obviously about the George Floyd thing,

but were very related to the lockdowns as well. It wasn't a coincidence that after three months of being locked in your home with no bar, no sports, no friends, no work, you know, that you then all of a sudden people were writing because cops have done, you know, fucked up shit a lot of times before. And this one led to national riots. That was all part of the cost of lockdowns. So the economy, the inflation that we're dealing with right now was a huge part of the lockdowns. And it was partly because they printed trillions of dollars as a result of being like, well, what are we going to do to make sure we're not in a depression if we just stop the economy right now? So, of course, the answer is always, well, we'll print trillions of dollars, hand out most of that to big corporations and give some crumbs to the American people. And so now you think of the cost of inflation.

I mean, people are getting destroyed from the value of the dollar going down right now and the cost of everything rising. This is all, these things are all interrelated, you know, and it's like, it's very hard to measure the cost of shutting down society. No, and that should have been taken into consideration. The fact that it wasn't is so crazy. But everybody wanted to be safe. And the government said we have to at least have an illusion that we're doing something to protect people.

Yeah. But really, I mean, in hindsight at this point, looking back at it, that if the government had just said, look, there's this virus, this nasty upper respiratory virus that's coming over here. And we think that if you are in very bad health, because this is like by March, it was very clear in the data of who was dying from this. It was very clear that it was old and sick people. This was right away. They focused a lot on outliers. They focused on young people. Yes, a lot of those young people unfortunately were ventilated. Yeah. Well, that's true, too You know Michael Yeo's doctor told him I'm not gonna put you on a ventilator because if I do you'll die And he got it early. He got it in like February

So it was early on his doctor was wise enough. Fortunately. Yeah. Yeah So it was early on. His doctor was wise enough, fortunately, to say, yeah. Yeah. No, but I'm just saying if you were being honest and not focusing on the outliers and actually looking at like what we can learn from this data, they could have just said, look, if you are at risk, we really recommend you isolate yourself. For everybody else, try to be smart. Try to be as healthy as you can. Like, you know what I mean?

And then if you feel sick at all, don't come into work. Like, don't, do not power through it. Do not assume it's allergies or a cold or something like that. Make sure, get tested. And the tests weren't as readily available back then, but just stay home, wait it out. You know what I mean? Whatever. Just doing that and not locking down the economy and not having all of these crazy restrictions would have unquestionably been a much, much better way to handle COVID.

Because look, from all these states, if you look at the lockdown states versus the non-lockdown states or the lockdown countries versus the non-lockdown countries, if you look at the mask mandate counties versus the non-mask mandate counties, you can't draw any conclusion from any of them. The truth is that this virus just moved the way it was going to move. And so all you were doing was just destroying people's lives. You were just adding more of a cost than the virus itself was going to add, which was already significant. And here's another thing they never did. When they got data and the data was pretty clear that a large percentage of the people in the ICU for COVID were deficient in vitamin D. And this is not saying that vitamin D is going to prevent you from getting COVID, but it 100% will increase the power of your immune

system. Vitamin D deficiency is a real problem with people's overall metabolic health. And there's a large percentage of our country because we stay indoors all the time. We don't do things. We're not active outside. Vitamin D is a hormone and your body produces it from the sun. And that's the best way to get it. But if you're not getting it that way, you can supplement. And it's a definite best second choice. And it really helps. And it makes a big fucking difference. It makes a big difference in everything, in muscle development, brain function. It's a real fucking problem with human beings. They had that data.

There was no like public declaration of this. Oh yeah, this was known way before COVID, yeah. It's such a simple thing to tell people. Vitamin D is so important. Go outside, lay in the sun. Go to a fucking park. Parks should be, when they shut parks down, that was fucking nuts.

Playgrounds down, basketball courts down, everything. down the ocean remember the fucking guy wakeboarding yeah it's like these people are out of their fucking minds and if they just did that then i would know at least you are taking measures based on data to try to help people and protect people and and just the insane thing is that they they all accuse people like us who talk about it like this of like spreading misinformation throughout the whole time. Meanwhile, the people who say that like, you know, right, like you should stay inside are not accused. You know, they don't get accused of spreading misinformation. The people who say, the people like the president of the United States and Dr. Fauci, the head of the pandemic response, who say if you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID and you won't spread it. Yeah.

Point blank. Point blank. That's what they say. That's how they sold this to the American people. And that's not like, that's not, you know, that's not going to get you kicked off Twitter or whatever. It's wild, man. Or the people that spread that story about folks that were, they were having overdoses

of ivermectin. And so they were being rushed to the hospitals. They had no room for gunshot patients because so many people were taking ivermectin. A total 100% fabrication and lie that was in Rolling Stone that Rachel Maddow tweeted. And then she doubled down on it afterwards after it was proven. We looked at the photo. We're like, why are those people wearing coats it's august in oklahoma well it also just if you would just had anyone who knew anything i'm not a doctor or anything but if you know anyone who knows anything about it you would

just look at that like i did the second i read that story go that doesn't sound right because ivermectin is known for being a very safe drug no whether the argument is that it helps with covid or not it's the reason why at the beginning doctors were giving it to people is because they were kind of like, well, this may help or it may not, but it's definitely not a dangerous drug to take. It's on the World Health Organization's list of most important medicines. Yeah, so it just made no sense.

You'd at least go in being skeptical of this. By the way, didn't it just get added? It just got added as a COVID treatment, I believe. Yeah, I don't know what the... Find out what that is, because what I've heard is it's just... They just put it on there because... Just to give people information about it.

Whether or not they're admitting that it's... But why do they even call it ivermectin? Why don't they call it horse paste? Why would they even refer to it like this? Here's the crazy thing. That might have worked on some people at the moment where people like oh my god These idiots are taking horse-paced But now given the amount of time that's gone on what it's done really is it's eroded

Significantly people's respect and people's trust in mainstream news, which I think is good This is fucking very good because you know we got to find out what CNN really is. It's a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. But if you think about it, this is the consequence of all of this stuff. And this one with COVID is the biggest one by far. But even when people would, I remember when Donald Trump was running

for president in 2016, and the people in the corporate press, who I know some of them, and they'd be saying these things like, they'd be like, he's just calling us fake news and liars and all of this. And like, how is this resonating with so many people? And they were like completely like,

and you're like, guys, I don't know. I mean, you sold a war where a million people died off this guy had weapons of mass destruction and he didn't. Like real people's kids went and fought in that war and then came back and blew their brains out this happened tens of thousands of american soldiers blew their brains out you know like a lot of people knew that guy well you know what i mean like i don't know and they know that you sold this war do you think

that the in in the next 10 years after that the fact that people have no trust in you there might be a connection there you know do you think the fact that people have no trust in you, there might be a connection there. You know, do you think the fact that even like Barack Obama, you know, saying, you know, whatever, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. It's all these lies. Like people remember this stuff, but man, if they think that the people in 2016 didn't trust the corporate press after this, the amount of people who will never, will never look at CNN again, will never look at the New York Times again, as if there's any pretense of even your pretending to tell the truth. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Or at least it's for huge numbers of people.

They'll never trust you again. You can never talk to them again. Well, I think what CNN is trying to do now is rebuild and they're trying to become a source of objective news. And I think this new guy recognizes the mistakes of you're allowing editorials by some of the dumbest fucking people on television and people that are only there because they were hired. One of the beautiful things about whether it's breaking points with Crystal and Saga, who it's my favorite show. They're great. One of the best points about it is there's no one no one running that but them that's you're getting objective information from people that you trust

they're gathering up everything they can find and they can give an assessment based on their understanding of these issues and then they debate it and they talk about it and they go over it back and forth. People chose them. People know they can trust them. So they follow them. That's not the case with people on television. They just get hired.

Well, and it's, right, it's a thing you can read that it's kind of like however you feel about Crystal and Sagar, they're not lying to you. You can kind of tell that they're telling you what they think. Not to say that they're right lying to you. You can kind of tell that they're telling you what they think. Not to say that they're right about everything, but they're also, there's no pretense of them being objective journalists. They both are opinion journalists.

They're both like, okay, she's kind of like a left-wing populist, he's kind of a right-wing populist type, but so they're like, but that's our opinion. We'll let you know that up front. Rather than pretending, I take no opinion here I'm just an objective journalist and you know But Brian Stelter did and everybody knows that we're real news and they're fake news. That's the objective truth

It's like no it's not it doesn't work I know one trusts you do you we don't even a real person like the way you talk is like a Lizard pretending to be a person. It's like very strange, right? Yeah. But what gives me hope about those two, Crystal and Sagar, is that they are a right-wing populist and a left-wing populist. And yet they're very good friends. And they get along great. And they have respectful conversations about things.

And you actually realize that they have a lot of overlap. Mostly. Which is a big thing that I think that the kind of powerful, like the establishment, work very hard to make sure that you don't ever think about that. Right. How much actually that your average like, you know, left of center person, right of center person has in common. center person, right of center person has in common. And this is why they love pumping these culture war issues so much, because they're the things that get the two sides fighting with each other while they're off at the top not caring. Like, you know, like what JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs or the Federal Reserve, what they love is when left wing America and right wing America are at each other's throats and

they're just raking in billions of dollars in profits because no one's looking at them. But if you really think about the things that most people care about, like most regular Americans care about the most, is they're like, you know, my health care is like really unaffordable. Or, you know, groceries just went through the roof. My rent just like went up by 25%. So it's like, you go, well, you know, does inflation fuck over left-wingers or right-wingers?

It fucks over both of them. Like, all of these things, it's not a left versus right issue. It's like a top versus down issue. You know who it really helped? It helped all of the people that got the big corporations who got all that bailout money when the Federal Reserve printed $6 trillion in 2020.

It was really good for them. It's really bad for you. It's the old George Carlin thing, right? It's a big fucking club and you ain't in it. And that's a left-winger or a right-winger. You're not in this club. It's that club versus you. That's the narrative.

And they have a lot more in common with each other. Let me tell you, the Republican politicians and Democrat politicians have a lot more in common with each other than they have with you. And left-winger and right-winger American, you have a lot more in common with each other than you do with Biden or Romney. You know what I mean? Yeah. And those culture war issues, that's the most important thing that you're saying. And this is something that people need to get in their head, that these culture war issues that we're seeing in the news every day, there is an element of distraction about that. No matter how much you think these issues are important, they are important. They certainly are. They are to people. Yeah, there's lots of them that are very important. They're very important, but they're not talking about them because they're important.

Right. They're talking about them because they know this will solidify people's adherence to the ideology, whether it's the right-wing ideology or the left-wing ideology. When you have people like Stacey Abrams saying that a fetal heartbeat is an illusion, like how did she say it? Yeah, it's not real. What you're hearing there isn't real or something like that. What did she say about a heartbeat?

She said at six weeks. Establish biology. I heard my daughter's heartbeat when Because this is like- She said at six weeks. Established biology. I heard my daughter's heartbeat when she was a six-week-old. I mean, you know, like- It's established biology. This is wild, ideological, crazy cult talk. Well, you just go, well, what was making that woomp, woomp, woomp, woomp sound that me and my wife listened to in the ultrasound? What did she say?

She said no such thing as a prenatal heartbeat at six weeks. The sound is manufactured. Just that statement alone should discredit you to the point where people should never listen to anything you ever say again. And what does she even mean? Who's manufacturing it? My wife's OB was just in the corner going, that's your baby.

He's faking it? What does that mean? She supports no limits on abortion. That's crazy too, because you're saying like eight months and four weeks or eight months and three weeks rather, like right before the kids coming out, that's okay? It's like this is the logical conclusion of this kind of like, well, my body, my choice, and no restrictions. And you go, so let's say that there's a woman who, whatever, right, eight weeks, nine months, because not everyone goes on their due date. Nine months walks in and goes, I just don't feel like it anymore.

Can I have an abortion now? Like almost everyone would go, no. I'm sorry. At this point, no. But anyway, you ever see, to the point of the culture wars as a distraction, you ever see like, you know one of those like Nexus charts where you can chart like words that are used in mainstream like big newspapers and stuff?

So you could chart like a word in the New York Times and how many times it's used. And if you, so, you know, Washington Post or whatever. If you take any of these like woke, you know, you take the term racism and you put it in a nexus chart and they'll show you throughout the years how many times the term racism is used in the New York Times. And it's like this. And then around like 2011, 2012, goes way up and social justice, way up, toxic masculinity, way up. Like, and this isn't coming

from like the young kids. This isn't coming from 20 year olds and this isn't coming from like the young kids this isn't coming from 20 year olds this isn't coming from the college universities these are the biggest corporate you know media platforms in the country all at this time like flooded the market with this woke shit now i'm not saying it didn't exist in in college universities i'm not saying that that wasn't already going on i'm just saying that what changed around that time, and it was right toward Obama's second term, what changed was that all of a sudden the woke shit went from being shit that was taught like in the world and all of the political class and all of it just got pumped in. And the theory kind of is that what had happened right then in 2010 was you had these huge, these, this big left-wing populist movement and this big right-wing populist movement. You had the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement. And they were kind of started over the same thing,

which were the banker bailouts. Like the first Tea Party things were started over the Ron Paul campaigns and the TARP. That was like when the first Tea Parties broke out. And then the Occupy thing was in direct response to the banker bailouts and all of this stuff. And you had these big movements. And the lefties back then were standing outside of the big banks screaming, we are the 99%. And when they were saying 99%, they didn't even mean 99%. They meant 99.9%. They were like, we're the people who don't own banks. Like the people who own banks versus the people who don't own banks.

That's who we represent. That was like the leftist populist movement. And then all of these huge publications. I'm not talking about mom and pop newspapers. I'm saying the New York times and the Washington post, you know what I mean? All they wanted to talk about all day was what divides all of them. It was like, no, no, no, you're not the 99%. You're the whites versus the blacks, the gays versus the straights, the trans versus the cis. And it does. And now you look at it and you see like the gay pride parade floats and there's like a Bank of America float.

And it just seems to me like these big banks essentially bought off the left with all this woke shit, completely distracted them from where their eyes were on the prize, and then turned the left and right against each other where now they're all fighting. So like to your point, it's not that what they're fighting about doesn't necessarily mean anything. Some of them are very important issues, but none of them affect the bottom line for the most powerful people in our society. And what are the bankers doing now since those banker bailouts? They got a whole new round of bailouts in 2020. They're raking in profits still. Nothing was ever addressed about that whole corrupt system. So do you think that there was a concerted effort to do this?

Was there a conversation? How do you think that there was a concerted effort to do this? Like, was there a conversation? Like, how do you think something like that happens? If you think that there's this ramp up, and it's been proven by these studies that if you look at the words, like, is it a function of people graduating from these universities and taking these jobs in these companies and deciding to push this agenda because they think that social justice is important because they do see these opponents of Obama as being these racist people that are like this underbelly of society that we weren't totally aware of, it needs to be addressed, or do you think that there is really like a concerted effort from corporations to get people to divide? And if that's the case,

how was it discussed? Well, I can't. So look, the thing is, essentially, the answer is I don't know, because, you know, I don't have like factually, I don't know for sure. But there's I think it was either I can't remember if it was Michael Tracy or if it was Matt Taibbi. One of them said it, or if it was Matt Taibbi. One of them said it, but he goes, I'm not saying wokeism is a CIA operation, but if it was, everything makes perfect sense. You know, so I'm like, I don't know. And again, those Nexus charts,

they're not even like studies. They're just mapping the word and how many times it's used. But there is no question that amongst the most powerful, you know, like forces in media, there was a concerted effort to do this. that amongst the most powerful forces in media, there was a concerted effort to do this.

And my guess is that it's much less likely that that came from the 20-year-old interns than that that came from some power source up at the top. And I think there was an effort to do this. And I think it came from the very top. And this has been going on, by the way, for a long time. Like back in the day, this is what they did to the right wing in this country. This is what National Review did when they turned the right wing into culture warriors, when they never were before.

Like the old right, the old, you know, like Robert Taft, who was known as Mr. Republican. His whole thing was like non-interventionist foreign policy, sound money, like some protectionism. So you protect like American jobs and stuff like that. It was all like this old school right wing thing. And then national review and all this like new right rose up in like the sixties. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, what really matters is like, there's homos out there. All right. Like that's really what us right wingers care about. What we really care about is abortion. What we really care about is, again, not saying abortion is not an important issue. I'm just saying, but they use that.

And then they were like, oh, and by the way, that non-interventionist foreign policy thing. Yeah, we're not doing that anymore. We're called warriors now. And we're going to fight communism all throughout the world. Get on board. this is this is a tried and true tactic to like break up these these movements that can actually threaten where like the real gravy train is and where is that that's like in the military industrial complex and the banking complex the pharmaceutical industrial complex that's where like that's where the real american fascism lies not in some like is that not in some people who

you know trespassed on government property in January 6th, who had nothing, was completely powerless, and then is now sitting in solitary confinement for how many hundreds of days. That's not the face of fascism in America. If you want to talk about fascism in America, look at the Patriot Act. Look at vaccine passports. Look at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. That's where the fascism lies. Well, the January 6th thing is not a small thing. Like when people enter the Capitol with zip ties, that's not a small thing. You know, and I don't think dismissing how fucked up that was is, I understand what you're saying. I'm not even saying that it wasn't fucked up or the guy who had zip ties.

And I heard, I don't know exactly what the story was with that guy with the zip ties. I'm not downplaying it. There were people in there that were 100% unhinged. I think there were some people in there that had they gotten their hands on Mike Pence or something like that, like something very ugly could have happened. So I don't mean to downplay that aspect of it. I'm just saying that like those people, even had they done something to Mike Pence or something like that, would have been shut down by, I mean, the military would have come in, the National Guard would have come in.

They were never a real threat to take over the United States of America and implement fascism. My point is that these people that I'm talking about are really powerful and actually affecting the lives of everyday Americans. And my other thing is that a lot of those people in January 6th weren't that guy. Right. And were just people kind of in the January 6th weren't that guy. Right. And were just people kind of in the crowd who entered the building. I can't believe we're inside. And also, what the hell was going on with Mike Epps and how does it make any sense that he is being- Ray Epps. Ray Epps.

I'm sorry. Not Mike Epps. Mike Epps is a comedian. Sorry, Mike. Great comedian. By the way, for the record, Mike Epps was not in January 6th. I'd like to correct the record and apologize to Mike Epps. So, sorry.

Ray Epps, who Democrats are now defending as like some guy who's being vilified. Who's defending him? There was some Democrat in Congress the other day who was like, just leave the guy alone. I mean, he wasn't a Fed. Well, look. You should be concerned if he's not a Fed, then he's on the other team. So why would you be defending him if he's literally inciting violence? Yeah, you would be calling him an insurrectionist or a domestic terrorist.

He's telling people to go inside. How are all these other people arrested and sitting in jail and this guy isn't is already quite an interesting question. What is his history? Do we know? I don't really know much about him. I know that that day. Point blank, it was Ray, the head of the FBI, and one other woman who was like, I think one of the top people in the Justice Department, were straight up asked in congressional testimony if there were any FBI agents or people working with the FBI involved in the raid. She would not respond. And they would not answer. They would not answer. They would not answer.

They would not answer the question. So just again, just, I'm more conspiratorial than I ever am on this show today, but just saying, I don't know. In that case, this is not just a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy with evidence. There's a real person. There are real conspiracies and it's reasonable to question some of this stuff. Amazing job they did of making the term conspiracy theory sound like you're a kook.

Yeah, even though- It has to be like Sandy Hook. It has to be something like completely preposterous. It has to be Pizzagate. It has to be, you know, lizard people. Yeah. Even though the official story of like all of these events are conspiracies. 100%.

Like the official story of 9-11 is a conspiracy. The official story is it's a conspiracy with Osama bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off Muslims in Afghanistan. That's a conspiracy. The war in Iraq was a conspiracy. No matter how you look at it, all these things are people conspiring. Yeah. Conspiracy theory being a negative term is a really genius thing. What they've done is really amazing. And I think they started that during the Kennedy assassination. I think that's when the whole conspiracy theorist term, because they're like,

Yeah, like you're not allowed to ask questions about this thing. Especially that thing. That's one of the nuttiest ones. And to this day, I still hear people saying that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind, or misinformed, or under-informed, or purposely ignorant, because you want it to be Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone i'm like you're out of your fucking mind or misinformed or under informed or purposely

ignorant because you want it to be lee harvey oswald acted alone the more you read about you ever talked to oliver stone no i've never talked to him but i've watched a lot of his christ oliver stone will take you down a fucking rabbit hole yeah and he has it all off the top of his head he could just rattle off data and information He's been following this Since like he made that film in the 90s that JFK films in the 90s And you know he just released a documentary series recently on Showtime that goes over it in depth I haven't seen that his uh his like American history Oh, yeah, docu-series saying was was really was really excellent man like i highly recommend

people watch that oliver's incredible i mean it's incredible that that guy was this and still is this genius filmmaker who also is incredibly well informed about certain things and he's a patriot i mean the guy served in vietnam he's a and he understands like the the pitfalls of all this shit and where let's go you can't just let it slide yeah also really worthwhile is watching his uh his interviews with putin um that that series of interviews that i did particularly considering what's going on right now which is like the to me the most important thing in the world and um it's it's this is like the next thing where now you know like you know like how kind of now me and you could talk about, like you could talk about, I tweet,

I put things on YouTube about the vaccine and negative effects of the vaccine. And I'm just not worried about it. It's just not that hot right now. But last year, you were doing that. You were like, man, this might get me flagged. This might get me kicked off. The conversation that you and I had.

Oh yeah, we got so much heat for that. For me saying young people, I would tell them don't get vaccinated. Yeah. And just that comment and then going on to say I would tell them to be really healthy and all of this. That comment, it was like trending for a week afterward. The White House is commenting on it. But now this conversation we just had, doubling down on it and defending it, this isn't going to trend. Because it's just we're not in that right now. But right. But then you see with, with the Russia thing, when that first starts,

then all of a sudden, if that's what's hot now, and this is how they always do this, like in the moment, they try to really make it, they try to make you intimidated to say the important thing in the moment. But man, dude, this thing with Russia is just like the craziest thing in the world. Like the idea that we're actually flirting with a nuclear conflict with Russia is the most important priority in the history of humanity is that America and Russia do not go to war. There's nothing more important than that. That's that's it. We'll destroy the human species if we do this. And yet there's this war right on Russia's border, and there's no effort to negotiate going on. There's, like, no effort.

In fact, from very solid reporting that actually America, through Boris Johnson, told Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia at the very beginning of the war when they had a deal worked out. They had a deal worked out. It's been reported in multiple sources that they had a deal worked out, they had a deal worked out, there's been reported in multiple sources that they had a deal worked out, and the deal was basically that Vladimir Putin would pull back, he would pull back his troops and leave Ukraine under the condition that, the very simple conditions, that Ukraine guaranteed autonomy for the Donbass region and agreed to never join NATO. And like, that was a deal.

Like, okay, I'm not saying everyone thinks that's the perfect deal, but it's better than what we got right now. It's better than nuclear war. And right now, just the other day, dude, the official narrative on this whole war, it's just like it makes no sense. And again, like I said, remember, the same people who are pushing this

are the ones who are telling you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and stuff. But the official narrative, Joe, is basically that, okay, so Vladimir Putin is a madman, a crazy war criminal who's hell-bent on reforming the Soviet Union. And this is a real threat that he could do this. But also he's getting humiliated in this war in Ukraine. It's like he's losing the poorest country in Europe and he's just getting humiliated

and beat back. But he's still a real threat to take over all of Europe. And he's a complete madman, by the way, Joe. But when he says he's going to use nuclear weapons, don't listen to that. He'd never actually do that, even though he's a complete madman. And as everyone says, this war, the word they use over and over and over again, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, all of them, unprovoked. Vladimir Putin led an unprovoked war in Ukraine. But then it's just like with Osama bin Laden, what they did with him then. Don't listen to him.

Whatever you do, don't listen to what he's actually saying because none of that's his motivations. Like his motivations are what we tell you. Osama bin Laden hates us because we're free. And then like Ron Paul would just go like, yeah, but that's not what he's saying at all. Like he, Osama bin Laden was so clear about why he hated America. And he was like, look, I hate you because you murder innocent civilians in the Muslim world. You prop up brutal dictators in the Muslim world. You prop up Israel who

mistreats the Palestinian people. And you have your bases in our holy land in the Arabian Peninsula. And then they're like, no, he hates us because we're free. He didn't mention anything about freedom there. And then if you say that, they're like, well, are you defending Osama bin Laden? And you're like, no, I'm just saying listen to your enemies. There's a reason why he hates us. And if you listen to Vladimir Putin and what he's saying, I mean, look, he's wrong for invading Ukraine. And I mean, you know me, Joe,

I'm the most anti-war fucking person there is. And there's no excuse for that. Like tens of thousands of people have died. It's horrible. And a lot of them are soldiers, but a lot of them are civilians. And, but to say he was unprovoked is like insane. It's just only people who know nothing

about the history of this conflict would say there was no provocation. Did you see the conversation that Roger Waters had with that CNN guy? Yeah, because Roger Waters was awesome on that. Because he knows what he's talking about, dude. And he's right about all of that shit. Look, this is what he was saying. He's absolutely right. He's absolutely right that the promise when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and this was like verbally promised and put in writing was that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. And NATO at that point, the line then was through Germany. Right. Like the western half of Germany was in the west and the eastern half was with the Soviet Union.

And they were like, we'll let all of these nations, you know, secede and the Soviet Union will collapse and we're giving up on communism. It's one of the greatest things that ever happened. And the deal was, OK, you do that, then we won't move NATO. We won't move our military alliance

into your area that used to be your realm of influence. And every single president since then has moved NATO east to the point that NATO is now on Russia's border. And in Ukraine, even though they didn't officially join NATO, there was always talk of it. Kamala Harris,

right before the start of the war, said, we're looking to put Ukraine into NATO. And they put, under George W. Bush, they put in Poland these dual- use rocket launchers. There's a big complaint that Vladimir Putin has that he's like, these can be used to get nukes here in a matter of minutes. This is a threat to us that we cannot tolerate. And then in 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that was completely led by the West. I don't know if you've ever heard, but I think I sent you actually once the tape of Gideon Rose, who was the editor for Foreign Affairs Magazine on the old Stephen Colbert report show

back when Colbert was hilarious. And he was just openly bragging about what the game is here. And then he was like, well, Ukraine is kind of like the Robin to Russia's Batman. And so our job is to steal Robin away from Batman and make him come over here and join us.

And aha, Vladimir Putin's so stupid that he won't do anything. And then Colbert's in his old character. So he's like, well, shouldn't Obama be spiking the football and saying, yeah, in your face, Putin? And Gideon Rose is like, well, no, no, because then Putin might invade Ukraine. So we wouldn't want to spike the ball. But there's these. Oh, yeah. but there's these... Let's play it. Go from the beginning, please.

Yeah, play it from the beginning. There's the magazine, Foreign Affairs. Now, Gideon, help me out here. We've got a battle. The Ukraine, some of them want to go into the EU, the European Union. Right. And some of them want to stay with Russia. If the Ukraine's not in Europe right now, what continent is it on?

Well, it's part of Eurasia, but it's part of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc. It's basically Robin to Russia's Batman. And the challenge here is to try to attract it to the West, to get it to flip sides. So the rebels in the streets, what are they fighting for? They're fighting for a better future. Countries have a development... That sounds like a political speech.

No, but it's actually true. Countries have to develop over time. And Ukraine, basically, after the end of the Soviet Union, faced two tracks. It could stay a sort of stagnant, corrupt, authoritarian country tied to Russia, or it could essentially join the West. It could modernize, liberalize, become a democracy. At the last minute, when it looked like it was going to trade up from its sort of abusive relationship

with its boyfriend from the hood to a nice, yuppie... You're not loading these choices in any way whatsoever. It's actually true. When it looked like it was going to trade up to a better environment, at the last minute, Putin offered a bribe. How much? $15 billion. That's a lot of cash, man.

It's a lot of cash. And the president, who himself was tied to the old elites and the eastern part of the country ties to Russia, decided to back off the change and go join Russia. Do you know how many pirate-themed restaurants you can buy with $15 billion? The problem was the western parts of the country and the younger parts of the country and the more modern liberal parts of the country

basically knew that they had no future being Russia's vassal, and so they took to the streets. Is America taking sides in this in any way? If these people, the rebels are winning right now, right? Yes, just recently. Why isn't Obama spiking the ball in the end zone and calling Putin and saying, hey, you might have won the medal count, but we won the country count, biatch. It's actually a very good question, and the answer is that we don't want Russia

to intervene and kick over the table like a game of Risk and take Ukraine back. Would they do that? Could he send in troops? Yes, he could. So we are choosing... Does Ukraine have any troops of their own? Would they fight back? Yes, but we don't want this to escalate and we don't want Russia to crack down.

So we want to basically distract Russia. Oh look, you have the highest medal count. Oh, you did really well. And focus on the Olympics. That's possible. Here's a shiny object. We'll just take an entire country away from you. Holy shit.

Isn't that funny? There's a power vacuum right now. There's a power vacuum. The opposition is all together. It's easy to agree on getting rid of the bad old regime and much harder to create a stable country in which everybody compromises and moves forward. They need a strong leader to move the country forward.

Do you know who's always good at a moment like that? Vladimir Putin. Do you think he might volunteer to come in and help Ukraine find its way? We don't want Putin to get involved in this, and so we want to try and involve him in this decision so that he allows Ukraine to go. We want to say we want a non-exclusive relationship with Ukraine. You can have a

relationship with it, too. You're the only one making this into a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship. Ukraine is basically choosing its future between two completely different courses of action, and we're trying to blur that choice so the old boyfriend doesn't get too upset when it makes the right choice. Jesus Christ. So, just to, that's basically,

that's the point, but just to add to this, right? So, and it's not just that the guy at Foreign Affairs is saying stuff like this, right? But you also have those, when he says the people took to the streets, you can trace where they were getting their funding from. And it's a whole bunch of NGOs that are. That's when I said George Soros. Here we go. You know what I'm saying? Goodness, it's a goddamn conspiracy. Thank you. That shit's wild though, right? It is wild It's going to be even wilder listening to the People theorize on why this went down We're back Are we back?

So explain what happened, Jamie Just so it makes sense I mean, I can keep all the video going It's just that my good audio recording Disconnected for a second So it's good? Yeah, we can keep all the video going. It's just that my good audio recording disconnected for a second. So it's not. So it's good. Yeah, we can keep all that.

If you need to. Yeah. All right. So. So it's just all these George Soros funded NGOs were funding the militias on the ground who were overthrowing the government. And then there's a tape of Victoria Newland, who's who's was at the State Department at the time, one of the top people at the State Department. was at the State Department at the time, one of the top people at the State Department. And she was basically talking about who would be the new government that took over, who America didn't want in, who we did want in the new government.

So it's not, you know, what happened basically was, as Gideon Rose was even saying, the Ukrainian government was kind of siding with Russia, or at least a lot more pro-Russia. And then we overthrew that government and installed a pro-America government. And this to putin he had said over and over again was a huge red line for him like ukraine was the big line and you could look imagine take it from our point of view if like russia was coming over here and overthrowing the pro-america government in montreal and installing a pro-russia government there and you know like this would be

seen as would you call that an unprovoked attack? You know, if we were to go in there and then go overthrow that government. So, again, I'm not justifying what he's doing. But and then the other thing to this, right, that's important to add is like you remember the two big things that it's so weird. No one like at least in the in the larger conversation, I don't see anyone connecting these things, is that there's two things involving Ukraine that were very big, that happened very recently in American history, that very much connect to this war. And one is that our last president was impeached over a thing with Ukraine. And what was that? And then the other thing is the current president's son was getting paid millions of dollars from a company, Burisma, in Ukraine. And these things all connect.

And basically what happened was after the 2014 coup, this company, Burisma, they were – and by the way, Matt Taibbi has done incredible reporting on this. I highly recommend everyone read his stuff, his sub-stacks. Incredible. Yeah, he's fantastic. Unbelievable. But so basically, Burisma was in bed with the old government that had allied with Russia. And so when this government was overthrown, they were very worried because they were like, oh, we were in bed with the old government.

And now there's this new government who's in there. And so instead of bribing the new government, they just went right to the source and bribed the son of the sitting vice president. Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was in charge of Ukraine policy. Oh, my God. So that was why they put him there. And then they put some other CIA guy or something like that on their board. They're just paying him money to just be like, hey, keep us in with you. And then Trump was telling them to investigate all of this shit.

He got on the phone with them and was like, I want to investigate everything that was going on with Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine and Donald Trump did he got into an area that it was there's an argument it was not okay what he was doing because he was kind of going like maybe you don't get this these these weapons that I was going to send in unless you go investigate them and this was his political opponent. So it was a little bit of a shady thing. But then the other story about that is that ultimately Trump caved and he sent in the weapons to Ukraine. So now not only did Obama overthrow the regime when Joe Biden was the point man, Joe Biden was running Ukraine policy. Obama leads this coup, overthrows that government and puts in a pro Western government. Then Trump comes in, sends in a whole bunch of weapons to this new government that Obama wouldn't even send in because he was concerned it would provoke Russia. And then the next president is Joe Biden,

the last guy who was the point man on Ukraine, who was there when this coup happened. Then he comes back in. This is all like the context that led to Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. So, again, I'm not saying – and the other little thing I should mention there too is that that Donbass region on the eastern portion of Ukraine is like majority ethnic Russians. And they got really pissed off when the new government came in in 2014. And they were basically warring with the the, you know, the Kiev western portion of Ukraine since then. And they had a referendum in 2015 and voted overwhelmingly that they wanted to be a part of Russia.

And Vladimir Putin didn't take them. But they said they voted that they wanted to be part of Russia, not a part of Ukraine. So it's just a very complicated mess. And it's the same thing with like the war on terrorism. And it's the same thing with like the war on terrorism. If you're going to tell this story of like what led to this to understand where to go from here. The story has to include that America was intervening in the Middle East for decades before 9-11. The story can't just start at 9-11. You know what I mean? And so I guess the biggest part is what I said before that the concern of all of us should be just that there's no nuclear conflict between America and Russia, which seems like we're dangerously close to. More close at any point in our lives than since the 80s. And I grew up during that time. There was this hovering fear over most of America that there was a potential for nuclear war with Russia. We always thought about it. Man man when I was in high school

We thought about it all the time when the Soviet Union collapsed It was the greatest sigh of relief like in my adult life And it was the the hover of war with Russia was out and then people got relaxed and then how long did that last? before Operation Desert Storm? A year. Yeah, like maybe a year. Right. And then it was like, holy shit, we're at war again.

I remember watching it on television. I remember being so confused because when I was a kid, Vietnam ended. And, you know, I was like, I think it was eight or something like that. I think I'm pretty sure I was living in San Francisco. I might have been a little older than that. Like, what year did Vietnam end? 72, 70. Wait, when did we pull out?

Oh, man, I might have that wrong. 73? So whatever year that was. So I was probably nine or 10 years old, I think. Oh, yeah, I guess 75. But I think we were pretty much out before then. Maybe I'm wrong about that. It wasn't until 75.

So either way. So I'm a kid, and I remember thinking at that time, like, wow, okay, this is great. Now we're never going to have war again because, like, we figured out that we shouldn't have war. Right. I remember really thinking that as, like, whatever I was, 8 years old, 9 years old. I remember thinking when I was hearing the war was eight years old nine years old. I remember thinking When there was hearing the war was done there were soldiers are coming home I was thinking oh my god We're never gonna have war again cuz I was terrified that I was gonna have to get drafted

you know and My stepfather He didn't get drafted he got lucky He was one of the lucky few because it was just it was a thing. People would dodge the draft. They would fucking move to the woods. They'd move to Canada. A lot of people moved to Canada. They were like, fuck this. And people don't understand how unpopular that was.

That war was so unpopular that Muhammad Ali decided to give up his heavyweight championship of the world in his prime. In his prime in his prime he was when he fought cleveland big cat williams which was was like what year was that that was ali's prime and for the next three years they made him sit out and he didn't train didn't do anything and he was a different fighter when he came back those three years of taking off like of not training at all like you could see it in his he never moved the same way that he did before no no no he was a different guy he still had some great fights and some great wins after that but it wasn't yeah it wasn't it wasn't the same go to cleveland big big cat williams show me that because cleveland big cat williams was this like super heavyweight. He was jacked, and he looked fantastic.

He was a knockout puncher. And Muhammad Ali just danced around him. It was magic, man. And he hit him with this fucking combination. If a middleweight threw combinations like this, you would be shocked. But here you have a heavyweight. How light he is on his feet just already. Oh, man. this was when he was in his prime this was Ali at the very best this is before they took it away from him and if you look at him then it's

timing everything his movement and Cleveland big cat what look out Jack Williams is I mean he's a dangerous fucking puncher and he's stalking Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali's just slowly putting it on him just finding the openings looking looking showing him this showing him that never standing right in front of him and as he got older he couldn't do that anymore man like when he fought Foreman he essentially let Foreman hit him he tired him out by doing the rope-a-dope on him but back then Ali was just Sonny Liston was fucking perplexed especially in their first fight the second fight it looks, Sonny Liston was fucking perplexed, especially in their first fight.

The second fight, it looks like Sonny Liston took a dive. But in the first fight, he was trying to get Ali to the point where he put liniment on his gloves. And he went back to his corner. He said, he's got something on his gloves. He's got something on his gloves. He goes, and keep playing that. And Angelo Dundee was like, you can't quit. We can can't take the gloves off champ like you're in the heavyweight title fight well, you got to fight through this so he fights through this and starts busting listing up and

Eventually stops him and wins the heavyweight title when listing quits in his corner, but he was you know, he was so good man He was so fast and nobody had seen a move like this This looks like it'd be so frustrating to fight someone like this. Oh, so frustrating. But you're just walking them down, and then they're constantly gone. But there, there he starts tagging them. Oh, yeah. So he starts tagging them.

And now Cleveland's confused because now he's getting hurt. He's getting hurt by this guy's moving backwards, and he can't hit him. Look at that jab. Look at that jab, dude. I mean, and his hands are low. And look at him. He steps in with a left hook, jab into the mean, and his hands are low. And look at it. Steps in with a left hook. Jab into the body.

And now he starts to piece him up. And when he starts connecting with him, you could see the magic that he had back then. It was just, there was combinations that came from him that you never saw a heavyweight throw. You would see like Sugar Ray Robinson throw combinations like this. To see a guy who's 200 plus pounds doing it was just unheard of. And even since then, I mean, when have you ever seen a heavyweight who fights like this? Nobody fights like him. Nobody fights like him.

And you'd think someone would have, because he's like the greatest ever, someone would have studied this and tried to replicate it. But like no. Ali could knock you out too, Matt. So once he starts finding Cleveland's number, and here you see him finding Cleveland's number, he's really starting to land some decent combinations on him. And Cleveland's still coming forward, looking to land the haymaker.

He's got serious power, and that's why he's so confident, right? He's moving forward because he knows if he can hit this fucking dude like he hits everybody else, everybody goes night-night. And all this dancing and moving around and stuff, inconsequential if he could land on him it kind of it reminds me of the way anderson silva used to fight like in his prime where he'd dance around and then when he start really getting in his rhythm just open up like crazy but he was 185 pounds yeah there's a little bit of that too

but anderson was much more subtle in his movement anderson was kicks and knees and all that shit anderson was just a master computer he would like download all your movements movements and put them in the master computer. And then somewhere around the end of the first round, he would start lighting you up. And you're like, oh, shit. He was like, yep, he collected all the data. The only people that were successful against Anderson made Anderson lead. It's very interesting.

Patrick Cote was one of the first guys to figure that out. He made Anderson lead. And Patrick was super dangerous. Like serious one-punch knockout power. And so he had that right hand cocked, and he made Anderson lead. And it was a very boring fight because Anderson wouldn't lead. And then somewhere in the fight, unfortunately, Patrick blew his knee out. And he blew his knee out like throwing a kick or something like that. His knee exploded and collapsed.

I remember, I think it was when he was going into the third round and he held up number three. I go, that's how big the aura of invincibility around Anderson Silva was. That he was like, I'm in the third round. And everyone was like, how is this even possible? How is it possible he hasn't killed you already? Well, Patrick was very smart. Very smart in his approach. And he fought a very intelligent fight if you're going to fight a guy like Anderson Silva.

And Patrick always had the threat of the one big knockout punch. He knocked out everybody, man. Patrick Ote, if he connected, whoo, that guy was throwing some fucking heat. He's coaching now. Yeah? Yeah, he's one of the most recent UFCs I saw him. It's good to see him coaching. It's good to see guys who've got a ton of experience

and were great fighters get involved in coaching. Because some of them actually make better coaches than they made fighters. Yeah, like Dean Thomas was a really good fighter, but he's probably a better coach than he was fighter. He's a fantastic coach. Because he's like one of the best. He's got the best insight.

Whenever we come to him, he should actually do... Yeah, he's great. He should be doing commentary for events as well, not just doing the thing that he's doing that way i would like to sit i would love to do a show with him where me and him do commentary like if it's a one that dc can't make or something he's great but it's like whatever whatever magic that we're talking about here with fighters like ali had it in a way during i think this fight This was like my favorite version of Ali Yeah

Because it's kind of a little bit of a mismatch ultimately we know because Ali went on to be the greatest arguably of all time But when you're watching the way he's able to do it like there look at that one to moving backwards Moving let me see that again. Just just back it up. Just to that. Let me see that again. Just back it up just to that. Let me see that again. Watch this. Bink, bink, bink. Oh, my goodness. Moving backwards. He drops him, and that's when he knows he has him, right?

He's been touching this guy up and touching this guy up and landing good combinations, but now Cleveland's fucked, and now he realizes it. And he's got this one style. He's a move forward guy. So he can't back up and start moving and dancing and avoiding trouble. He's got to one style he's a move forward guy so he can't like back up and start you know moving and dancing and avoiding trouble he's got to stand right in front of him and Ali's just fucking tuning him up and drops him again bro he was sensational back then sensational I mean he barely got hit in this fight. Barely got hit. Barely got hit.

Didn't get hit with anything clean. It was just beautiful, man. Just artistry, the movement in and out. Look at that left, right. Jesus, stop the fight. And then he stands over him with his hands up in the air. Come on, son. Come on, son. So was this one of his last before he got up, before they wouldn't let him fight for not going to the draft?

So, yes. This was the last. This was the last one? I believe this was, there might have been one other fight. I'm not sure. So he makes it to the final bell. He makes it to the bell because he got saved by the bell in that last round. So he gets up. They move him to his stool.

But now he's fucked, man. And now Ali's on fire. Look at him, man. Just, you know, if people want to see Ali, I always want to show them this one. Because this was Ali at his most beautiful. I mean, this was just fucking masterful. He was just fighting a perfect fight. Look at these combinations, man.

I mean, and how gutsy is Cleveland Big Cat Williams that he keeps getting up? So now he's been dropped four times. Yeah, they should be throwing the towel in here, man. 100%. But back then, they didn't give a fuck, dude. You fought. They were harder people, man. Yeah, they should be throwing the towel in here man 100% but back then they didn't give a fuck dude Yeah, I thought dudes just they were harder people man. Yeah. Yeah for sure. It's a harder sport boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom Boom boom. I mean come on man. Look at this combination and look at him avoid those punches Look at him like it's like two magnets like the gloves can touch him. And then he clips him with that right hand.

I mean, this shit is just artistic. This is the most martial arts. The most artistic of martial arts. And that's it. That referee's, that's enough. That's enough. That's enough. And no complaints.

That's enough. My God. No, that wasn't a stoppage. That was a saving. Was that his last fight before jerry quarry because jerry quarry was his comeback fight and jerry you could see in that fight like his body looked different it says here this was on november 14th 66 and the article i have here that says he was convicted on june 20th 67 so he could have had another one in between let's go to his wikipedia and see that, I want to say that that was it.

I want to say that was it. But that to me, that to me is like, there's fights where you like, for me, it's like, I know it's not the most important fight of his career, but Marvis Frazier versus Mike Tyson. There's fights where you just go, God damn, who's going to fuck with that version of that guy? Mike Tyson versus Marvis Frazier, that's my fight. And I say, you know, Mike Tyson knocked out Larry Holmes. Mike Tyson beat all these great fighters.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But the Mike Tyson that took out Marvis Frazier was one of the scariest fucking human beings that ever walked into a ring. Ever. He fought twice. He fought twice he fought twice after that yeah and then jay corey was after okay so he won still was a unanimous decision against ernie terrell and uh won uh with a knockout against uh zara foley that was another great fight if you go to that fight too that was another fucking fantastic performance so but

the cleveland big cat william Williams was just an exceptionally impressive one. So it's that and then three years of nothing. You remember the Carlin bit about it? No, I don't. It's like one of my favorite jokes ever. No. The Carlin's bit. He was like, Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali, he had a strange job.

Strange job. He beats people up for a living. That was his job. And then the government says, we don't want you to beat people up anymore. We want you to kill people. And he goes and he goes no no that's where i draw the line and then because then the government goes well if you won't kill people we won't let you beat them up it's just like such a great bit because it's completely true you're just like it's like when you put it like this how is this not the most insane shit ever that's literally

what the supposed like leaders are deciding yeah well he was that's literally what the supposed leaders are deciding. Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why he was so important is because he wasn't just an important athlete, like the greatest boxer that we'd ever seen as a heavyweight for sure, but he was also an important cultural figure because when he was saying, no Vietcom guy ever did anything to me. I'm not going to go over there and kill people. And he said it publicly. Like, this is why I have no problem with Vietnam people. Why am I'm not going to go over there and kill people. And he said it publicly. Like, this is why I have no problem with Vietnam people. Why am I going over there to fight them?

Why is my government telling me to go over there and kill people? I'm not doing that. Yeah, and as it turns out, it was for no good reason. All sold off a lie. Yeah, all sold off of another conspiracy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is a real conspiracy. And that's not even something that people debate anymore. No, it's not debated.

It's just like this is this is just known you go to the gulf of tonkin so we can because i don't want to fuck this up but the way we got into the vietnam war was basically just a made-up story and it's true with the the lusitania in uh world war one two it was like completely uh um the way the story was told to the american people what's that story it was basically that there was like oh this ship that had um uh americans uh on it was shot down by german submarines and they were like well why would they do this they knew it was just a ship of of civilians but then it turns out that actually the ship was delivering weapons to the british and so it's like oh yeah you were delivering weapons into a war zone.

Got a little bit more reasonable to shoot down your ship. The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred August of 1964. North Vietnamese warships purportedly attacked United States warships. The USS Maddox

and the USS C. Turner J. Two separate occasions in the Gulf of Tonkin, a body of water neighboring modern-day Vietnam. But what actually happened? New documents and tapes reveal that what the historians could not prove, there was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964. in the Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by the Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress. So was there an initial attack and not a secondary attack?

Was there any attack at all? Yeah, I haven't read up on this in a while. But they definitely made that up and it was completely misrepresented. And yeah, it was all like, you know, an effort. It's hard because it still seems like the official story is that it's not a hoax. The official, see what it's saying there.

Like it says it was passed on August 7 1964 by the US Congress after an alleged attack on two US naval destroyers sanctions in the coast of Vietnam it doesn't say that that was a hoax well the history.com version probably wouldn't go into the right right but is it a conspiracy is my question or is it just proven fact over time that just hasn't been accepted because the initial narrative by the government has never been rescinded? Yeah, I think that it at least partially has been admitted, that at least they lied about the way they presented it. Jamie will get to the bottom of this.

I mean, what do you want? Do a full research project on the Gulf of Tonkin right now? Please do. You have time. Is there a way to see whether or not it was a hoax? Like, how do they know if it was or was not a hoax?

There's no source to go to for that, necessarily. So when people say that the Gulf of Tonkin was a hoax, are they just hearing it from me and repeating it?

No, it's not just from you. There's a lot of people who have been saying this. No, Oliver Stone said it. Yeah. But how much of that is based on provable fact? Yeah, I'd have to. I did. I remember learning all about this, but it was like 13 years ago.

Yeah. I'm a little rusty. I'm a little rusty. It's one of those things. I'm glad we just looked it up because it's one of those things that I just repeat. Yeah. Yeah. But sometimes you repeat it based off your previous memory of this,

but I'm like, no, I remember knowing this. So I'm pretty confident in repeating it. That is the worst thing about memory. Like you can repeat a memory of it wrong. All right. Yep.

Here's another, uh, reporting of this. It says there remains no doubt that North Vietnamese attacked the USS Maddox in the first incident on August 2nd. Although it does appear that the United States provoked this attack. The second attack, which took place on August 4th

1964, What the fuck? Is that a commercial? Oh my god, they just make you watch a commercial? You should be right in the middle of reading by now. Website compromised. I don't even know which one I clicked on. Is that what it said?

Website compromised? No, that's what happened. I'm telling you, that's what happened. That website, see, it's just going back to some ad. You have to confirm that you're not a robot. No, no, no. You don't click that. That's how you get more of those.

No, no, no, no. They're just trying to make sure you're not a robot. I think it's just good people doing their job. Yeah, they're just trying to make sure you're not a robot i think it's just good people doing their job just fine folks doing their job to kill democracy find out what you click on and put it in a fucking database that's ai slowly gathering information on us yeah something's up with it well but any but even as crazy as the war in vietnam wasn't it's just horrible it slaughtered like so many like people in a country so we could impose that they wouldn't be ruled by the communists or something like that. And what is it?

How many Americans died in that war? 50, 60,000? Okay. American planes hit North Vietnam after a second attack on our destroyers. Move taken to halt new aggression announced the Washington Post headline on August 5th, 1964. The same day, on the front page of the New York Times reported, President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam

after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. But there was no second attack by North Vietnam. No renewed attack against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. But there was no second attack by North Vietnam, no renewed attack against American destroyers. By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War. A pattern took hold. Continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media, leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. The official story was the North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an unprovoked attack against the U.S. destroyer on a routine patrol in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2nd, and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a deliberate attack on a pair of U.S. ships two

days later. The truth was very different. Rather than being on a routine patrol on August 2nd, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence gathering maneuvers in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Navy and the Laotian Air Force. The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam had taken place, writes scholar Daniel C. Hallen. These assaults were a part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964. On the night of August 4th, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf, a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national

TV later that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war, airstrikes against North Vietnam. But Johnson ordered US bombers to retaliate for North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened. So it didn't happen. Yeah. I can read the whole article, but this is boring already. Yeah, but basically the whole thing was completely misconstrued and made up, right?

So what they're saying is that they acted like, oh, it was just this unprovoked attack on one of our naval ships when actually the first attack, our naval ship was involved in this what they called called aggressive intelligence gathering so basically coordinating with the other side who was bombing them and they had just been bombed twice by the other side and then the days preceding it so they responded and then the second attack just never even happened right so that's i mean it's it's and the thing about it is is that there it's it's like it's like they knowingly lied about this because they wanted a pretense to get into the war. And it's so much how all of these wars start and all of the ones since. But the difference is like at least in Vietnam, basically the thing has been since World War II that like we fought a whole lot of wars. But we don't fight wars with nuclear armed powers.

We fought a few proxy wars with nuclear armed powers like Vietnam like Vietnam. And a proxy war with Russia in Vietnam. Or in Korea. Like a proxy war with Russia, but in Korea. But there was a buffer zone there. Like it wasn't right on Russia's border. And it wasn't right on our border. So we could kind of like fight these proxy wars out there. But the thing with Ukraine is that it's like...

Like I really think... The thing that scares me about the nuclear threat from Vladimir Putin is that I feel like he can't lose this war. And the American position is that he must lose. He must completely lose the war and retreat and give Ukraine all going to happen. He's not handing the whole thing back over. And you may think that's wrong. And I kind of think it's wrong, too. I don't know. I think maybe he should keep Donbass. I don't really know. But it's like it's not going to happen.

And Joe Biden is acting like he must win this war. But that's not really true. We don't really need it. But Vladimir Putin does need it. He can't lose a war right on his border. That's a different type of thing to give up and so now he's saying that if the territory of Russia is Infringed on he will use nuclear weapons and he said straight up. This is not a bluff because this is not a bluff I will use nukes. He's just said this the other day and then Zelensky

goes on on and gives a speech and And then Zelensky goes on and gives a speech. And Zelensky says that his standard is not just that Russia has to retreat and give back all the territory to Ukraine, but that Russia must be punished for the aggression into Ukraine. And then Zelensky says that if Russia even thinks about using nukes, that the other nuclear-armed countries should use their nukes against Russia. And you're just like, dude, what the fuck are we talking about here? I'm like, I'm sorry. No, no, we shouldn't. We shouldn't use nukes against Russia preemptively because this Zelensky guy wants us to.

The people that we have that run the country, there's not one thing that you point to and you go, well, they're fucking awesome at that. Right? Not one thing. Not one thing where you're like, I have full trust in them when it comes to that. Not a single thing.

Not a single thing. Yet we're entrusting them with the biggest, most important thing ever. Yeah. Avoiding a nuclear war. Imagine how crazy that is. Now imagine what kind of person wants that job,

like these unexceptional people that we're talking about before. These aren't the people that are like the thought leaders of the world. These are the people that win the popularity contests, and a lot of them are winning because they're connected to whatever the fucking current hive mind ideology is, and they pump up and they use these words and they say the certain things that that group is saying whether it's on the right or the left that's what a lot of these people are

doing well it's kind of and it's kind of the flaw it's a flaw in in the democratic process in a way yes because it's like well i'll just play to the most low information you know voters who really outnumber the high information voters you know what's gonna change that what's that mind reading yeah maybe oh maybe that maybe that's what we gotta hope for let's hope that comes before the uh the nuclear war i think that's gonna be like life before the internet and life after the internet but like times a million and i think it's coming and i don't think that's uh i don't think it's an if it's a matter of when and only if if we don't blow ourselves up or get involved in some sort of a natural disaster right hit by an asteroid super

volcano that kind of shit could fuck everything up but if that doesn't happen if we can just keep going on this path and let these super nerds figure shit out for the next thousand years or hundred years or whatever it is that it's going to change everything because we're going to know how people actually operate how they're actually thinking and it's going to be really weird because like all of our thoughts of romance and and inner interpersonal relationships and how people really feel about you all of them are going to be exposed like we're all on mushrooms. It's going to be a very weird thing.

And I'd imagine, I mean, I don't know enough about this, but I'd imagine even before you get to the point of just reading someone's thoughts, you probably get to the point of just reading whether they're lying or not. You know what I mean? Just knowing whether what they're saying is a lie. Like being able to kind of like figure out, not like a lie detector test, which isn't as like reliable, but like actually being able to find out, no, we've figured out the scientific like, you know, indicators that somebody is lying and you could wear something. You could have a lens on that will tell you this person's lying or whether they're telling the truth.

Sometimes you just know. Like, why do you just know? You're not always right. Like there's certain people that could just lie right? They're probably really good at it, and they do it a lot But with some people like when they're lying to you. There's like a feeling yeah like a disruptions in the force like what's happening here Yeah, it's a very very interesting thing and just not even and that like that's almost like what I was saying before we were Talking about a crystal and Sagar and then like we then we go like, they're not lying to you.

And I just know they're not lying to you. I don't know either of them personally. But I just know. I could just watch the show and be like, those people aren't lying to you. No, they're not lying to you. And I don't think they're right about everything. I probably disagree with both of them about several things. I agree with them about other things.

But they're not lying to you. But that's supposed to happen, man. The idea that you're supposed to agree with everybody about everything is so crazy. Yeah. And this is part of the problem with having a right and a left, is that you get attached to that team. And they'll label you in order to frame you in some nefarious way. You see it all the time with people. And then the more heated things get, the more people get dug in to each team.

Because you're so furious with the other team that you're like, well, I've got to be with this team. So then even if that team does something wrong, you're like, well, I've got to be with this team to protect me from this other team. 100%. And have you been paying attention to this new leader of Italy, the woman? Yeah, I saw her, the speech that everybody's flipping out about i've been following a bit about it it is very interesting yeah this is what's fascinating there's two groups of people that i follow and their reactions to it are so hyper different there's like the right-wing people like fuck yeah italy and then there's a left-wing people like the far right, you know new leader like this is dangerous

Fascist right fascist rhetoric and connected to fascism They've really overplayed that fascist hands because you know if she if that's what they're saying this The brothers of Italy or something I think is our political party and they're saying that they represent some some neo You know Mussolini and movement or something like that. I don't know. But I do think that – like I don't know what you think about it. But I thought what she said in that speech, I got it. And I get why it's appealing.

And I don't think there was anything at least in what she said in that. What did she say? Can we read what she said? Because she said it in Italian. Yeah. Well, I'm okay. That's also true I'm just assuming that the words on the bottom of the screen when she were talking was actually what she was saying I do not know Memes yeah, see that one when it's like, you know, I can't believe Dunkin Donuts is having a sale What is uh, those fucking memes are so funny, man. When they do that

over the Hitler speech. It would be so funny if I'm just saying all this stuff and I just read the wrong translation. I was like, I don't know,

she just said like family and Christianity is fine. And then they're like, what she actually said was we need to round up the Jews. And I'd be like,

oh, okay, I am not for that. Then I'm going to go on record and change my opinion. I didn't like that part. But it would be too late because I already have you.

Yeah, that's right. Dave Smith is all for rounding up the Jews. It's written down. But but I'm a Jew he wants to round up himself this is it's self-hate he's an uncle Howie what is the I was trying to read if I mean I'm assuming she said it in Italian so now I'm she did well she she also English. She spoke at CPAC and had a speech in English. I'm trying to assume this is what she said, but I don't know. She said, we're assuming the translation is correct. If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone.

We will do it for all Italians, and we will do it with the aim of uniting the people of this country, Maloney said at her party's Rome headquarters. Italy chose us, she said. We will not betray the country as we never have. As polls in the run-up to Sunday's vote showed her as likely winner, Maloney has moderated her far-right message in an apparent attempt to reassure the European Union and other international partners. This is a time for being responsible, Maloney said, appearing live on television describing the situation for Italy and the European Union as particularly complex. Maloney, who campaigned on a motto of God, country, and family, said the result was only a beginning.

This is a night of pride for brothers of italy but is a starting point not a finish line she was quoted as saying by the guardian yeah well but already that um just just at that point of because they're saying like well she campaigned on god country and family and i understand i i can understand um so i grew up in a very liberal, you know, area. And I understand where, like, a lot of people on the left don't like the idea of a political leader campaigning on God, nation, and family. Like, they're like, hey, this should somehow, like, government should be neutral on those issues or something like that. But, you know, at least I would think, like, if you're, like, a liberal or a leftist or something, at least, like, understand, like, why do you think it is that that message is so appealing to so many people? And you have to almost objectively say that, like, look, those things are things that a lot of people care about.

You know, like, just in the 20th century alone, how many people were willing to go and fight in wars for under the banner of nationalism like for their country? You know yeah, and like people care about their country and obviously people care about their God a lot and obviously people care about their Family a lot and what I saw of her assuming the translation was correct in her speech was she was saying that these things are Constantly under attack right now, and there's no need like we don't have to live in a society where like Christianity and patriotism and family is constantly being demonized. Like all of the things that we like to identify as are constantly being demonized. And I would at least like say to like left-wingers, you know, if you keep up this game of like demonizing all of those things, there's going to be a right-wing response to it people are going to rally around the political leaders who are like

saying like no we're for traditional families and christianity and national greatness and i'm not even saying i'm for that but i get the appeal of it yeah but not even saying traditional family just family period yeah i mean it's not it's not labeling a traditional family, just family, period. I mean, it's not labeling it traditional family. But the idea that those things would be offensive. Yeah, it shouldn't be. But here's the thing. It wouldn't be offensive if it was a particular god. So, like, if you're talking about Islam, like, if you are against anything that is Islamic or Muslim, you'll be thought of as Islamophobic.

There's no Christianophobic, which is fascinating. It's really weird because there's a political leaning in this country where people look at people that have certain religious beliefs and they'll mock them. Like Christianity is a very easy one to mock because, well, the easiest are like Scientology. That's number one. Sure, sure. And then Mormonism is, you know know it's like Joseph Smith was 14 when you wrote that you know it's kind of it's wild shit right but those are easy but when it comes to like what the one you're allowed to mock you're allowed to mock

Christians that's the one that's like the easiest to mock if you mock Muslims and is the Islamic culture like you're in danger. Yeah. But I would also. Physical danger. Yes. I also think you're right about all of that. But also a distinction that I'd make is like it seems to me when there's the mocking of Mormons or something like that is more of a kind of like making fun of them.

Whereas with Christians, there seems to be like real vitriol in it with them. Like there's more hatred toward them hatred and it's connected to stupidity It's it's connected to like a lack of intelligence and a lack of education and you know Yeah, no question about that And when in fact it's like you know the truth is that for for better or for worse and there was a lot of both There's a lot of good and bad, but Christianity, I mean, you know, had a huge impact on civilization.

And it's like it was the foundational ideology of Western civilization. Now, that doesn't mean you have to be a Christian, but all of that is really dismissed, like the contributions that Christianity made to the world that so many of us enjoy well You mean it's not like Christianity needs a fucking walk star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but it's but it is it's an ideology that millions of people hold and

there's Tenants in it that could lead to a better world if people followed them that's undeniable. For sure. To treat people as if they're your brothers and sisters and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There's certain principles involved in a lot of religions that guide ethical behavior. The problem is you're so outdated.

Well, that's true, but that's the problem, right? When you're reading these things, it's so like they condone slavery they treat women as second-class citizens there's like a lot of like weird shit but but most of that stuff at least in christianity isn't actually followed in practice today right like people aren't practicing slavery and aren't practicing treating women like second-class citizens the way it's laid out in the Bible. And, you know, the thing, like the flaw to me, at least the flaw in atheism is that it's always, the idea is always sold as like, well, look, you have like, um, you have reason and then you have faith and faith is believing something in

the absence of reason. So reason is preferable to faith. But the issue is when you remove religion, it never is in any mass level replaced with reason. It's always replaced with another religion. Right. You know, it's – and because the desire to worship is so hardwired into humans that, like, you know, you see – you look at the most insane, like woke kids on some college campus. They're all atheists, but they're not atheists. They're the most religious zealots amongst us. You know what I mean? So it's like you remove this thing and then it's like the promise of this vacuum will be filled with reason never really comes true. And at least while you're right when you say like, okay, well, these religions are very old and outdated, but the flip side to that is like, well, they've been stable for thousands

of years. These have at least been able to work. And if you accept that basically there's going to be some religion, whatever it is, you know, like the Nazis basically got rid of religion. The commies really got rid of religion, but there was just state religion is what, you know, filled the void. And it was much worse, much worse than Christianity. Um, so you're like, if there's going to be a religion one way or the other, I'd probably like the one that is at least has thousands of years of stability behind it and has at least like moderated on its worst issues and is no longer being used as a justification for how many times you can beat your slave a day, even though that is in the book, you know what I mean? But like people aren't really doing that

anymore. So yeah. If you're going to base it all on that to the, to the word, then you're going to have a problem in modern society. Like then you, how, how can you be a Christian and follow those rules? Well, yeah, that's going to be tough. That's if that's what it's saying. But I think what people need is something that makes sense for today. You know, something that, and I think it's probably psychedelics. I think if there's going to be a thing that brings people, the problem is that that the problem with that is just like the problem with anything else it's humans and humans get involved in things and ego get involved in things the next thing you know you're a guru and next thing you know you're banging all your disciples

and you're living on some fucking you know like wild wild country you know like that's what that's where it fucking goes because because of humans because we are primates and we we do have these fucking weird dominator minds. And even when you connect them to psychedelics, it creates these people that, like, they get all this adoration out of, like, introducing ceremonies and having people, you know, come together and do these things together. And it's a weird thing. Well, there's always, with all these things, there's a lot of benefits, but there's also, like, the negative sides, right? There's a lot of benefits, but there's also like the negative sides, right? So it's like people do have, particularly with like psychedelics, like with mushrooms and LSD and stuff like that.

People do have these like pretty amazing experiences. Yes. And I've had some. And there's a lot that you can learn about the world through them. But then they also do make it kind of like, you know, and I've never done a DMT or ayahuasca or whatever, but particularly with those, like you are in a state where like, okay, if you have some guru or whatever, who's like leading you through the journey, well, that person is put in a position of a lot of power over you now. You know what I mean?

And you see like this stuff with Manson, he would like, he would stay sober and give them all the mushrooms and then guide them in these crazy directions and stuff like that. Well, did you read Tom O'Neill's book? No. Oh my God. I've said it for a million times. I'm sorry if you heard this before, folks. There's a great book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill.

Tom O'Neill was Greg Fitzsimmons' next-door neighbor. And this was like fucking 20 years ago. He's writing this article about Manson. So Greg never suggests people. He says, you've got to have this guy on. He just finished his book. It took him 20 years to make it and he details how he kept getting fired and he missed deadlines But he's just so obsessed with the data and trying to figure out what's going on

But that whole fucking thing with Manson was a CIA psyop He was a part of all that MK ultra LSD studies Yeah, it's crazy letting him out of jail He was getting arrested and then they would go to the people that arrested him and gone No, no, no, no, no Let him go and they would have to let him go and these sheriffs were like it's above my pay grade And they had to let him go and he was connected to a bunch of different robberies and shit. He was on parole He should have been locked up

Jolly West visited him in jail. It's documented he visited him in jail. And he was a part of their program. They would take people, especially people that were charismatic, and teach them how to use psychedelics to influence people. Wasn't Ted Kaczynski was like a similar thing, right? He was a similar thing.

He was a part of the Harvard studies. Right. And he went fucking cuckoooo and they just fucked with him too I think with the Ted Kaczynski thing part of it was just fucking with him like not even it's just insane I just make him feel like shit. They're like, what if we just treat him like shit constantly, huh? I wonder what would happen if we did that so well so many things went wrong with him Did you watch the Netflix documentary? I haven't seen that I've read a decent amount about it, though It's some sort of an illness when he was a baby when he's really young

So he took him to a hospital where no one touched him They just left him in his crib to scream and cry and just kept him fed for like months And it's fucked him up. Yeah, and his brother Talks openly about how he could just like connected those like those times love, you know him being a child and Like he just had no empathy for people no connection with people like they raised a monster Yeah, I'm just not having him be touched and then that same guy These studies Jesus goes on to blow people up like what a shocker Fuck man, and he was a super genius

Which is like the worst combination ever and so of course like there's these things right like if you like You know when people first like really started discovering when that when they discovered LSD and when people like you know what I mean Like it's like there is this thing was wow this has so much potential It's very interesting and we don't exactly understand it But it really creates this these like experiences and then it's like you leave it to like the government to be like well let's use this in the most fucked up way imaginable how about that let's dose up johns when they're going to brothels and study them through mirrors it's just insane oh but i do think there's like with even with uh with pot which is i guess just a mild uh a milder hallucinogen, right? I think there are a lot of benefits to smoking pot,

but then there's also like these real problems with it. I know I used to smoke a ton of pot, and I think that I kind of credit, I think it's one of the reasons why I'm good at breaking down this type of stuff. I think it really helped. I think there was something about it that was, it allowed me to

To kind of zoom out and question things and look at them in different ways. You know what I mean? Like it's a very uh, Remember the video you did that went super viral things before you started the podcast It was right around the time that went real viral about you talking about war Stuff like that and it was like this viral video. Someone edited it together. And it was all you talking about. And I remember you said in the thing, I loved it, where you were like, wait a minute. So we fight these wars.

You're telling me we send big metal machines of death to go like rip human beings apart. And just the way you describe that, that's like that's the way somebody who's done some hallucinogens or like smoked some weed in their life would describe it. I smoked some weed five minutes before I said that. But that's the way somebody who's done some hallucinogens or smoked some weed in their life would describe it. I smoked some weed five minutes before I said that. But that's the way you would describe it. It's like, well, let's zoom out and just look at this from a different angle. What the fuck are we doing here? Because that's what hallucinogens let you do. They kind of like you rise above your own little preconceptions and your things and you focus on what's really going on here.

But then like the downside to that is that that also allows for like escapism because you're not worried about your own little dumb life anymore. You're worried about like the bigger picture and things. But sometimes people need to be worried about their own life. They actually need to be worried about like how are you going to make worried about like, how are you going to make rent this month? Or how are you going to do this this month? And I see that with young, with young guys sometimes where it's like, you are smoking way too much pot. Yeah. That's where personal responsibility comes into play.

My description of pot was like, it's like a tool, like any other tool, like a hammer. You could build a house with it or you could hit yourself in the dick. It's fucking crazy. I think that's right. And that's, that's what the way I think about marijuana. Like, I think you have to have some structure and you have to have some discipline in your life to get anything done.

Now, if you don't have those things and then you also really enjoy getting high, that's going to be a problem. Yeah, that's a bad combination. The problem is not getting high. The problem is your behavior patterns lack structure and discipline. If you knew the things you had to do and you went out and did them and you pursued them because they were the most

important things, whether it's finding meaningful work, whether it's get, you know, whatever, whatever you're trying to do in your life, focus on that primarily because that's, what's going to get you ahead in life. Yeah. And if you're not doing that, that's the problem. And if you're smoking pot at the same time, you're not doing that. that's the problem. And if you're smoking pot at the same time you're not doing that, it's not the pot's fault. It's your fault. Yeah, I completely agree. And anyway, none of that is a justification

for any of it being illegal. None of it is. And too many people find benefit in it. It's too beneficial. Medically, psychologically, it's too beneficial. And even the stuff that you could argue is not beneficial should also all be legal. Yeah, it's like cocaine.

It should all be legal. Cocaine, if cocaine was legal, we would have so much less death in this country. Dude, there's so much less death. We got 100,000 ODs a year in this country right now. Number one cause of death for people 18 to 49 is overdoses. The life expectancy is going down because of the overdose epidemic and we still can't just work up the the like the will to just be like give it up just call call it quits on this war on drugs that they're dying

because they're getting fentanyl on the black market and they have no idea what the dosage is of it and people are going out and getting what they're told is heroin and they're told is cocaine and has all types of other shit in it. They're not – they can't get these opioids anymore. So now they have to go and try to get them from drug dealers. You got people dying in the drug trade, the smuggling coming in from Mexico. And that all goes away if you just legalize it. I'm not saying everything is perfect. I'm not saying – and when I say all of it, I mean I don't mean like that nobody will ever abuse drugs if they just legalize it. I'm not saying everything's perfect. I'm not saying, and when I say all of it, I mean, I don't mean like

that nobody will ever abuse drugs if they're legal. I'm just saying that the smuggling is completely over and then the overdose numbers will like drastically be reduced because at least people will know what they're getting

and know they're getting clean stuff and like know they're getting the right dosage and stuff like that. It's just like, it's insane. Like it's such an emergency right now in America And like no one is really well, and then you hear these people even Trump what a fucking idiot He has the other day where he goes. Oh, yeah, what we need is the death penalty for drug dealers You're like that's it by the way a president operation warp speed is

Concerned with drug dealers like you know but it's like fuck yeah, that's the problem We haven't had harsh enough punishments for drugs. That's the problem. We haven't tried that yet. You just shoot them all. Yeah. Well, it's got, you have to be, it has to be regulated and it has to be legal. Because if it's not, you're going to get unregulated illegal drugs and you're going to prop up criminal

organizations that are extremely violent that could just walk across the border. That's what's happening. And all this talk about the border not being important, like, then why do we have it? What are you saying? Like, is this a real issue that thousands of people are coming across every day? That seems like it's an issue. Of course it is. The thing when they did when they shipped them off to Martha's Vineyard?

Pretty funny. Come on. I mean, it's fucked up, but it's pretty funny. It's fucked up and funny, and the response was fucked up and funny. Yeah, it was- Immediate. They immediately took, we don't have room for these people. They just immediately, 50 people.

All of a sudden, they start sounding like everything that they called racist right away. It's just kind of like, well, this is a big issue, and it's a strain on our resources, and they have to go somewhere else, but we're still the good guys and we love them. But we simply, at Martha's Vineyard, cannot accommodate 50 people. 50? Dude, there's 2 million coming in this year. Migrants who just came across the border. I mean, and

2 million. 2 million people have snuck across the border this year. Is that the number? Well, it's projected to be 2 million for the year. Did you see that the number? Well, it's projected to be 2 million for the year. Did you see that hilarious interview where Kamala Harris is... The border is secure?

Yeah. You know what she's like at this point? Do you know how there's those comics that are, like, really good comics, but they have a girlfriend, and the girlfriend does comedy, too, and she bombs every time and, like, you know,

maybe takes her off the road for a little bit, tells her she's got to tighten up, and then next thing you know like who's opening up for Jeff oh he's a bros girlfriend again like oh no oh no he's gonna give it another chance like they trot her out every now and then they're like give her one more chance let her talk better talk and it's always chaos it's like now she's so trigger-burnt like she's so she's like you could tell that she's she's shell shocked Yeah, it seems like she's gotten much worse. Yes She's like I almost feel like she's like are you like is this a caricature of what the worst thing to say would be?

She can't help it. It's like she's Freezing right and she like if you caught her in like earlier campaign speeches and when she's like Comfortable and having conversations with people she doesn't seem inarticulate. She seems pretty smooth. She was a lawyer, right? Yes. Obviously, she's not dumb. She was a lawyer and then, yeah, right.

It's the world watching. It's time and we got to take care of time and it's most important when time passes. And if we do it together then we will move on as a community together as one in a sense of community together and you're like what what is happening here it's like what are these what are these democrats gonna do man like can joe biden actually run for re-election and if he doesn't can they actually put up her like you know there are like democrat like big donors somewhere like you're like okay here's the end goal we get biden and kamala harris out of the way go back from there what

does the day before that happens look like because we got to get them out of the way and get somebody else in here right because i mean biden like how do you do that how do you get them both out if i was kamala harris i would be taking no small planes yeah that's right well i don't think it seems like biden is not uh backing off of he wants to run to visit the dmz after north korea test a missile oh that's where they're sending her they just sent nancy pelosi up there too They're like, hey, we'll never know. They might do it for us. Well, the crazy thing was her going to, when she went to Taiwan. Yeah.

The bag of diamonds. They told her. Joe Biden, how insane this is. This has happened like so many times where he'll just say something. And he says literally the most insane thing in the world. Like he just came out and changed the one China policy. Yeah. Which is the most reckless thing.

It's right up there with the stuff that he's doing with Ukraine and Russia. They go, dude, you can't just say that the policy is to overthrow Vladimir Putin, dude. That's like a huge thing to say. And then they come out and they go, the White House issued a statement that their policy has not changed. And you're like, who's the White House? And what's this president? Is it the chief of staff? Is it the vice president? Is it his wife? Who's the White House? He's the head of the White House. And what's this president? Is it the chief of staff? Is it the vice president? Is it his

wife? Who's the White House? He's the head of the White House. So he comes out the other day and just says, and the whole point of the one China policy is basically, and this is actually one thing that was smart strategic U.S. foreign policy, is that they basically went, okay, so we

recognize China, okay, this is your area, China, But you know, we also like Taiwan and we'd also like to see a reunification and we kind of like it to all be peaceful. And we're very ambiguous about where we stand because the problem is if you were to come out and say what Joe Biden just said the other day, he goes, oh, if China invaded Taiwan, we would send in the military. Well, the problem with that is like, that might be the encouragement Taiwan needs to go, okay, then we declare independence. And if they declare independence, China will invade Taiwan. And then, holy shit.

And by the way, all of our like, Navy, like war games say that we lose that war. Look at this. China sparks new Taiwan invasion fears with threat to crush anyone who tries to stop its reunification with the self-governing island after Biden kowtowed to Beijing at UN.

That's why having a guy like him in office is fucking dangerous. And this is what they said about Trump. That's fucking, but that's legitimately dangerous, man. And this is, I got a lot of shit about this when I had Eric Weinstein on. I was like, I can't vote for Biden. Like, I'd vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.

And the reason being is like, you knew this. You knew he was deteriorating. Forget about his policies when he was lucid. Yeah. he was deteriorating forget about his policies when he was lucid yeah forget about like i mean he was lucid during the the the obama administration you barely heard from him yeah he was much much better if you listen to like a speech he gave in 2012 or 2013 he has lost several steps see regardless of what you think about his policies, like as a human that's in a position of extreme stress and power, that is nuts. That's nuts. That's nuts. It's really unbelievable.

That's insane. He's so far gone. But I mean what is more reckless than just like and and and the crazy thing about it You know even Henry Kissinger like came out recently and was talking about how insane this whole Ukraine Policy is because he's like well What do you do is the plan here that we're going to provoke Russia and China? Like we're gonna provoke nuclear conflict with the two countries who you just don't want to have a nuclear conflict with and you know Whatever anyone says and I know there's some like some of the kind of populist right winger types who are real China hawks and are really concerned about China. But the truth is that neither one of these countries pose a military threat to America. It's just like it's there's just no way there's no way that they pose a military threat to us.

Like, does China pose a military threat to Taiwan? Perhaps you could argue that. Although the peace has been kept for many decades now, but you can argue they pose a threat to them. But they don't pose a threat to us. And the idea that we're like trying to find, it's just so bananas that you go, okay, so we have 20 years of the war on terrorism,

which is basically at this point, almost nobody even argues that it was anything short of a disaster. I mean, I've seen, I saw Bill Kristol debate Scott Horton, who's incredible. Everyone should check him out. Scott Horton at antiwar.com. And he debated him in New York City. And one of the people in the crowd asked a question, Bill Kristol, you know, neocon number one guy. And he goes, what was the last U.S. intervention that was successful? And he I think he said, I can't remember if he said said. But even he didn't try to defend any of the interventions of the 21st century. He didn't even try to say. He couldn't. He couldn't even look this kid who asked him the question, look him in the eye and go, Iraq, Afghanistan least a couple million, you know, innocent people dead. Not to mention, I don't know, what, 50,000 of our soldiers who have blown their brains out after they came back from these wars, a few thousand who died in the battles, you know, and trillions of dollars wasted, nothing to show for it.

And finally, we end the longest one, the war in Afghanistan, you know, and we're finally kind of moving toward like, okay, we kind of recognize that this is wrong. So let's start provoking a war with Russia. And how about China too? It's like what you were talking about at the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then you're like, oh good, we don't have to be at war no more. And you're like, Saddam Hussein, we got to go fight this guy now. We're just always trying to find the next war. And I'd say this is potentially even stupider than that. Because the Biden guys, they're talking about Putin like he's Saddam Hussein. Like he's Muammar Gaddafi. Like we could just tell him what to do and he has to fucking do it. But he doesn't.

Because he's sitting on the biggest nuclear arsenal in the history of the world, second only to ours. I think his is first. Actually might be first. Yes, actually might be first. I thought ours was the biggest. Yes, yeah, I think you're right about that. But it's like, it's kind of a moot point because- We can all destroy the world many times over.

Many times over. Yes. And then there's the threat of hypersonic weapons. Yeah, yeah. That apparently he has. That's what he says. But didn't he engage one in Syria? Didn't they try one?

Yeah, I read that. I don't know if- Not in Syria. No, it was in Ukraine. It was recently. I don't know about this. I read about this, but I haven't verified if that was confirmed, it was in Ukraine. It was recently. I don't know about this. I read about this, but I haven't verified if that was confirmed that it's actually true. But I know that basically this was his big thing in response to George W. Bush putting the dual rocket launchers in Poland.

Is that he was like, well, now our entire effort is to improve our military capability because you can hit us quicker. So now we have to be able to hit you quicker. And it's just been like this brinksmanship for so long it's just so stupid we have these really narrow narratives that were fed in this country and this one of the things that i love most about this conversation is because these these all these things that you've laid out and all of these things that most people are not aware of about the history of this conflict like now people get an understanding of how this is a pattern that just is going this is what eisenhower warned of this is a pattern that exists and is going to exist in this current form if we keep supporting it yeah no that that's it and just that it's not

um and it's not that there's you know and then I get people who try to like almost, you know, like kind of counter with the simple opposite narrative. It's like, well, you're supporting this or we have to support the freedom of these people and stuff. But I really think what what has to break in America is this empire mentality, this mentality that even if something is bad is happening around the world, well, then we must go and stop it. And you're like, you know, I heard people talking about this with the protest going on in Iran right now. We have to support these people who want freedom. And you're like, dude, this country was just locked down for like a year and a half. We were in lockdowns. Maybe we're not in the position to start exporting freedom around the world. Why don't we start at home? Let's try to make this a free country. Let's work toward that.

And paradoxically, every time we go to expand freedom around the world, we get less and less freedom here. And then we don't end up giving any freedom there. It's like we got to go bring freedom. Have we ever brought freedom anywhere where it's super successful? I mean, you could argue that in post-World War II, Japan and Germany. But by the way, that also came with the price tag of slaughtering their civilian population. You know, like it's not as if that just went easy. But, you know, then if you look at the war on terrorism, I mean, we went to spread freedom to the Middle East.

But that comes with the price tag of the Patriot Act and the Department homeland security and you know all of this stuff and then by the way we didn't bring any freedom there either so and i think that what we were saying earlier about the way the internet has kind of changed the way people view governments and people view information and people have access we're more informed maybe more confused in a lot of ways than ever before but i think mind reading is the next one maybe i think when that happens we're fucked More informed, maybe more confused in a lot of ways than ever before. But I think mind reading is the next one. Maybe. I think when that happens, we're fucked. We're fucked for a while because it's going to be mad chaos where people try to make sense of people's real thoughts and real intentions and the real mechanisms behind everything that runs the world.

All of our money, our government, the mindsets of people that are just trying to acquire money and how insane that is. How insane is just the pursuit of only numbers. That's it. The constant pursuit of numbers and objects. Well, there's also like, there's this thing where there's like

the pursuit of money is almost like, I break it up into like two categories where there's like, there's a lot of people pursuing money, but a lot of people are pursuing money like private citizens you know like in the marketplace are like even if they're really trying to pursue money basically the only way they can get it is like by offering a product to people and see if they want it right it's like if you want this if you're willing to

buy this then i can make money off of that but you only buy it if you think like well i would like to have that i value that and then there are these people who are connected to the government who are basically in rigged games where they've rigged they've stacked the deck against regular people where you essentially have to give them money you don't have a choice and so like that's and those people are just like that's a win-lose relationship not like a win-win relationship you know what i mean and um i really think the only hope like i've said this to you before but i think the only hope hope for America is some form of liberty, some form of libertarianism. Like we've just gone way too much in the other direction of like the government having way too much power and running everybody's lives. And the only way to like, to like save this thing,

to cool off the culture war, to stop drowning the next generation in debt and destroying our currency and all of this stuff is to just like there's got to be some form of like decentralization limiting of the power of government rolling back some of these institutions and the only way to do that is to get enough people to demand it and then enough powerful people to support that you know like get enough like powerful people like on board with this and enough popular support to just like be like, okay, there's real will. The problem is once the game is rigged,

it's hard to get people to go back to normal. It is. They've had a rigged game for a long time to open it up to an ethical, logical, reasonable playing field at this point in the game

where it's like really locked down Well, you mean like so from the extract so you're saying like for those special interests who have this game rigged, right? So like I think what it's almost got to be is some combination of like where the there's enough of the people who are so angry and are just demanding their their freedom and that this this rigged game be rolled back and then It's almost kind of like they're like, look, you got away with this for a long time, but you're going to meet something, like you're going to meet a very bad fate if you continue on this path.

Dread. Well, I don't want there to be violence. You'd much rather be like, hey, look, take this deal. Cut your losses net. Like you did this. You got away with it for a long time. Go away. Stop doing it.

Because look how angry you're going to make these people if you continue ripping them off um but you i you always want a peaceful solution to all of this stuff but there's got to be you know like look i'll say the thing that to me is like the silver lining the note of optimism is that there there really is something important about people waking up there's a reason why they work so hard to propagandize people there's a reason why they flipped out on you so much for having just like Dr. Malone and people like that on your show. They're really concerned about that. They're really concerned that you might talk to people and that they might hear from this expert and they might believe him. It's like, why are they so concerned about that? Because if they knew that,

they may not support these policies. And if they don't support these policies, they may not be able to get away with them. That's ultimately why the COVID passports failed. Just because enough people were outraged about it. They didn't even give this a lot of coverage. There were huge protests in New York City over this stuff. And then it was just like people weren't doing it. They weren't following the rules and stuff.

And eventually they just walked it back. There's like real power in waking people up. And so that's what, that's, I think there's, there's at least a hope for the country now that it's like people don't trust these institutions that they shouldn't trust because they're just lying to them. And there's platforms like yours, you know what I mean, that are bigger than any of those platforms where people can hear the truth. So I'm optimistic at least for that as long as we stop provoking Putin and we don't fight a nuclear war. Yeah, all the above. And I think there's just – the problem is that people who talk like you don't become governors. They don't become senators. Maybe senators, maybe.

But they generally know and don't become president. Yeah. You know, you have to play the game. And what do you think it's like if you get into office? What kind of fucking horrible shit are they going to write about you i don't know there's too many people in the libertarian party who want me to try to find out but uh don't do it don't do it dave smith i say that as your friend but if i wasn't your friend i'd be like fuck yeah that guy should do it well what if i just run but i don't win that's not good enough that's not good enough but that's no but see it

could help in the effort to wake a whole lot of people up. Maybe. Maybe it'll confirm people's suspicions that no matter how good a candidate is, if they're not one of the two candidates, one of the two parties, they're not going to support him because it's a wasted vote. Yeah, but even that would be an interesting thing to let people know. You know what I mean? It'd still be an interesting thing to at least point out to people. It's like, yeah, but that's the essence of the problem and then the crackpots would say that you're taking away uh votes that could have gone to uh my party whatever it is right or left yes and you're the reason why we lost you piece of shit you fucking coward you unpatriotic traitor you treasonous this that or the other thing yeah you would you do get that but i also just kind of think i, and this is why I'm a member of the Libertarian Party

and this is why I joined it. I'm excited about it because my camp kind of just took over the whole party. There was a little civil war in the Libertarian Party between the Gary Johnson. Of course there was. Well, there's the Gary Johnson people and the Ron Paul people.

And I'm like the Ron Paul people's guy. And we won. We took over every position in the party now. But my thing about why a third party is just that at a certain point you're like look there's an argument to this like okay if there's a lesser of two evil well then the third party might help the more evil of two evil get in or something like that but at a certain point you're just like this is the united states of america still kind of or at least it's supposed to be. And both of these two major political parties have just committed treason against the American people.

Like absolute treason. Just raped this country and destroyed everything it was supposed to be about. And we're better than that. And we should at a certain point just go, now, you know what? We won't support either of you guys anymore. Because like, fuck you guys. You don't deserve our support. Somebody else should get it.

And then, hey, there's this party over here that just stands for what? Liberty. Like, how about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights? That's a good place to start. That's what we were supposed to be about anyway. So let's just go with those guys. How about this? How about we just take that clip and we put it out there,

and that's the announcement that you're running. That's all you do. No, I can't make the announcement that I'm announcement that you're running. That's all you do. No, I can't make the announcement that I'm running. No, no, that's all you do. Just put that out. That's it. No campaigning. Nothing else. Okay, but then I also have to tell people go to lp.org slash join.

Because you've got to join the party because that would actually send a lot of messages. And don't watch Legion of Skanks because that alone would be a... Now let me tell you something, okay? Now let me just, I just want to mention something. The corporate press probably is going to bring up Legion of Skanks.

Now when you hear of Legion of Skanks, I just want you to know they can do anything with video these days. They can make it sound like you're saying anything. I don't know who that guy is. I've never met Jay Oakerson or Louis J. Gomez in my life. I don't know these people.

They don't seem like good people. I'll tell you that. They're funny. They're pretty funny. They say some funny stuff. That's the problem is that you and I are both connected to the world of stand-up comedy. We're both comics. But it's not.

I don't know, man. No, no, no. I don't think it's a problem. I'm saying that's the problem with having great ideas like you do. You're also connected to blowjob jokes. Those are the clean ones. Ari taking a shit in Tupperware and bringing it out to the stage. We were not on board with that joke, for the record.

None of us approved of that at all. God damn it, what's wrong with that guy? He's the best. He really is. He's the best. Best and the worst. He's the wrong with that guy? He's the best. He really is. He's the best and the worst. He's the worst too, but he's the best. But yeah, it's like, um, you could just take that clip of you explaining what it means to be a libertarian and what you stand for and just put it out there. It goes viral. No more campaigning. Yeah. Well, that's kind of the plan. Okay. That's

what it is. So you run for 2024? Do you wait for nuclear war and you could be our Mad Max? And then it was like the rebuilding process? You could be a part of the rebuilding process. I really gotta get on a building, a bunker or something if I'm gonna make it past the... You gotta get out of here, son. Get out of here. Plenty of deer. Lots of land. That's true. This is where you wanna be when shit goes down. Lots of

bullets. Yeah, but I really think you're gonna need like, if it's nuclear war, you're gonna need more than just land and deer. You're going to need some type of like bunker. You're probably not going to live if you need that. Yeah. You have to think about like what kind of nuclear war are we talking about? Are we talking about just like Los Angeles and New York get evaporated?

Are we talking about every major city in the country? If it's every major city in the country, then it's over. Yeah. Every major city in the country, then it's over. Yeah. And then anyone who lives, you know, the lawlessness that you see in horrible YouTube videos and on TikTok or whatever, that will pale in comparison to living in a post-apocalyptic world with no power. Yeah. If there's no power, shit will get so primal so quick. And you will also realize how few bullets there really are not enough There's not enough bullets

You need to understand like if you're like hunting every day and trying to find food and you're protecting yourself from gangs of Outlaws that are trying to steal your Livestock and your family members like this is the kind of world we're talking about well It's a talking about like walking dead like real walking dead shit where people behave like monsters it's it's interesting like how fragile civilization is and how easy it is for us to just be so removed from that you know what i mean like and and that's all like uh and by the way i don't think we're gonna go to nuclear war i don't mean to be like alarmist on that but i'm just saying like it's so dangerous to play this game and if we had like sensible adults in charge of anything everyone would be

together unlike the look the obvious number one priority here is like everybody get in the room and make sure we don't go to this you know what i mean so freaking china the other day at the un this is how pathetic it is that we let China that who's, you know, this like one party fascist dictatorship, you know, like kind of right wing communists, like now they're like communists, but who believe in business or something like that. They, they, we let them at the UN Biden's up there and he's like, Putin must surrender. And this is everybody, everybody should be on the side of Ukraine against Putin and blah, blah, blah. And then China, they get up there and they go, we call on all parties to de-escalate.

And you're like, did you just let them be the adults in the room? Did we literally just let this one party authoritarian dictatorship come up there and sound like the reasonable ones? We ceded that ground to them that we can't even just say like no actually everybody should be trying to take the temperature down here you know another thing that um roger water said that stumped that cnn guy he said china doesn't invade anybody like china hasn't invaded anybody in 100 years well this is what china yes yes something like that yeah no china does they've never been an expansionist but at least for 100 years. They haven't been. And, you know, the funny thing is like how China is gaining.

Look, there's no question, right, over the last 20 years, let's say, American influence in the world has gone down and China's has gone up. But the way China's been doing it is by doing business with the world while we're fighting wars with the world. So what's the lesson there? It's like stop fighting stupid wars. Do business with people trade with people have good relations business yeah they're doing some shady business for sure

they're doing some shit that we were criticized for doing right like offering loans going into places making sure that they can't pay the loans yeah no there's over territory that's for sure resources that's for sure but certainly i don't there's any – it's smarter than going in and just spending a trillion dollars to kill a few hundred thousand people for no reason. It's like why is one morally and ethically superior and why is that one war? I mean think about the two different business models that you're talking about, that ours is morally and ethically superior because we have free speech. Is that what it is? Because we have abortion? Because we have all these things that we want over here, so we're okay with doing what we do in other countries?

That's where it gets squirrely, because if you say what China's doing is scary and dangerous and awful, like, yeah, yeah, so is what we do, right? Well, right. It kind of all depends on what side of it you're looking at it from. Like, if you're, like, an Iraqi citizen, then, yeah, what we did is pretty scary and awful and horrible. And, you know, it's also just it's been so damaging that it's like George W. Bush and Barack Obama too.

You know, they fought the war on terrorism under the banner of like this is freedom and democracy. Right. the banner of like this is Freedom and democracy right and that and then it's kind of like oh why why aren't other people like getting on board with freedom and democracy It's like I don't know because this is how you defined it as dropping hellfire missiles on weddings Like if that's freedom and democracy who wants the head and so it's it's the damage is like, you know, like all these other things Imagine if that was going on in this country. Imagine if there was drones that were targeting people that the Iraqis wanted dead or the Iranians wanted dead. And they were killing 90% civilians. 90% regular people that were just going about their day.

But unfortunately were grouped up with a person who had metadata on them. Yeah. And that's, by the way, that even that 90% number is like, that was just who wasn't the person on the target list. But even of the people on the target list, they get that wrong sometimes and just had the wrong person on the target.

Oh yeah. So the actual number is even of like people who weren't actual terrorists is even higher than that. And like, yeah, imagine. I mean, imagine like there was just right, like a campaign in, you know, Chicago to do that. Right. We're just blowing up buildings, you know, because we suspect someone that's a suspected bad guy is in that building. So we blew it up.

Turns out it was just kids. It was just a daycare. They have metadata. And the people who did that and then they don't even like lose their jobs no the people who supported that don't even lose their job they just go like yeah i now agree it was a mistake anyway here's why we got to do this it was a mistake most of them at least acknowledge that iraq was a mistake right but they're not saying that the drone attacks no that's true that's that no that's that's fair mistakes but the drone program yeah

and it's still going on i mean biden's dropped a bunch of drone bombs i mean it's a trump did a ton of them too they're kind of known they are they doing it like or is it happening with their authorization is it happening whether or not they know about it like how much involvement does biden have in day-to-day drone operations i mean it's how much uh how much involvement does Biden have in anything that's happening in the material world? But you're saying Biden did it, right? Yes, under the Biden administration. So technically under his authority and at least by what the rule of law says, he could stop it. Right.

But in your opinion, how much influence does he have on that? My guess is he is – there's just other people in charge of it. Do you think they even assess him? I think quite possibly they it's possible they do because Biden was, you know, like Biden is somebody who would probably approve of these things, even if they did run it by him. But I also I mean, I know with with Donald Trump, like they bragged in certain in certain areas where they lied to him about the number of troops that were in different regions. Like there are all types of lied to him about the number of troops that were in different regions. They lied to him? Yeah, they lied to him about the number of troops that were in Syria, and they bragged about it.

There's articles on this. Who's they? They misled him. It was somebody at the Defense Department. I don't know. Jamie, you could pull that up. But it was that – or someone at the Pentagon. But they were basically like they misled him about the number of troops that were actually there. Purposely.

Because he was saying he wanted to pull all of them out. Oh, and they were like so it's just and the fact that there's even articles written about this and you're like wait a minute But that's the commander and however you feel about him that was supposed to be the commander-in-chief Outgoing Syria envoy admits hiding US troop numbers praises Trump's Mideast record. We were always playing shell games says AMB, is that? Ambassador. Jim Jeffrey, who also gives advice to President-elect Biden. So he still gives advice to Biden while he admits to playing shell games with information. We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had here.

There, Jeffrey said in an interview, the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is a lot more than the roughly 200 troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019. Trump's abruptly announced withdrawal, U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps a single most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office. And for Jeffrey, the most controversial

thing in my 50 years in government, the order first handed down in December of 2018 led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump's special envoy for Syria into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest Reese resignation of its of his predecessor Brett McGurk okay so basically it's basically what they're saying is that this one guy stepped down because he was upset at Trump so the next guy just lied so mad dog Mattis right was Trump's first defense secretary, which is so bizarre. It's such a Donald Trump thing, too, is that Donald Trump was running on ending the war in Syria.

He ran on that in 2016. And then he picks this guy, Mattis, as his defense secretary. And then when he tries to end the war in Syria, Mattis resigns over it. He's like, I will not do this. I'll resign before I carry out these orders. And you're like, did you guys never have a conversation about this? Like when you were running on ending this war and then you picked a guy to be your defense secretary, did you never like talk to him about like, Hey, I, by the way, I mean it like I actually want to end this war.

So he resigns Trump's like, whatever, I'm still pulling out of the war. And then the next guy who comes in and moves up the ranks just starts lying to him about How many troops there are there and by the way the story at the end of this is that Trump just backs down and just doesn't Doesn't end the war which is basically what Trump did on everything Mattis is a scary, dude Yeah, I think that's why I'm a man. You ever hear Mattis talk about whether or not he sleeps well at night No, I don't think I've heard find that clip. I don't even want to butcher it someone questions Matt whether or not he sleeps well at night, knowing that the enemy's out there.

This is the type of guy you want to be a general. Well, I think this is probably the type of reason why Trump picked him. Yeah. Like, this guy's badass. Listen to this shit. Hold on a second. Keeps you awake at night. Nothing. I keep other people awake

at night. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keeps you awake at night. I do remember that. Nothing. I keep other people awake at night. Yeah. Instant. Instant answer. Yeah. But, look, I mean, I think you want badass guys like that, but who are also, wise enough to recognize like what's strategically in America's interest and what's there.

Right. And, you know, Donald Trump did get the guy in and the guy is Colonel Douglas McGregor, who is like this. You know, he's like one of those real badass dudes, but who is wise enough to completely to completely turn against American foreign policy in the Middle East early on. I think he got out in 2005 or 2006 or something like that. And he's basically just been speaking out against it. He's like, this is not in our national interest to be doing this. And we're doing nothing but bankrupting our country and putting ourselves in a more dangerous situation and all of this stuff. And Trump hired him, and he made him the top advisor at the Defense Department after he lost the election to Joe Biden. So he had him there in the lame duck period after Biden was there.

And they tried to work out a deal. In fact, I think Trump signed off on the order to immediately withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan and, I think think one other theater. And then like a couple days later, Trump rescinded the order. Someone else got to him and convinced him not to. What kind of conversations are those like? Like imagine the first day in office conversation. You know that Bill Hicks joke.

Oh, yeah. Great joke. Great joke. But other than that, imagine other than showing you a angle of the jfk assassination you've never seen before yeah right which maybe that's it i don't know but what what the fuck do you think they tell you because you don't know jack shit while you're running right i mean they they don't assess you if nothing i guarantee no i mean lose then you'd have all this information well supposedly you're getting like some of these intelligence briefs you know after you're president-elect um but but not before but i think it also doesn't even have

to be as dramatic as the other angle of of jfk getting shot i mean what they what donald trump ran on in 2016 and just for the record i don't really i don't really never know what donald trump how committed to any of this shit he was. Cause the only thing that I've ever seen Donald Trump truly be committed to is his own greatness and his own, yeah, his own, I'm the winner. You're the loser. Like that's, that's, that's what he seems to really be motivated by. But he said in, in the 2016 campaign, he goes, what, wouldn't it make sense if we were just friendly with Russia and we worked together since they were fighting ISIS in Syria? He goes, we also want to fight ISIS. Let's work together, fight ISIS, and then leave the Middle East and not worry about regime

change wars in the Middle East. And we could be friendly with Russia. We could make a deal with them and get along with them. There's no reason why we shouldn't. And that's what he kind of ran on. And then, you know, just all day long, everyone in the media, in the entire corporate press, all they were saying is Trump's Trump-Russia collusion. Trump's in a conspiracy with Russia. So now it's like, go try to make a deal with Russia. How can you? How could you make a deal with Russia when all day long everyone's saying you're involved

in a conspiracy with Russia? And then you come out and go, I just made a deal with the Russians. They'd be like, proof, proof. There's a conspiracy with Russia. And then you come out and go, I just made a deal with the Russians. They'd be like, proof, proof. There's a conspiracy with Russia. So they deliberately boxed him in to be like, so now he had to prove how much he wasn't in bed with Russia. You know what I mean? And he did this in a bunch of things.

Like he tore up the INF treaty, the like intermediate missile treaty. Here's how much I'm not in bed with Russia. I'll tear up a nuclear treaty. You're like wait what that's an insane thing to do I tell you he pulled out of the treaty whatever however you want to call it he's like by the way it'd be really good to be in that treaty right now and then he ended up same thing with Ukraine he bailed he said he caved and he sent in the weapons

you know it's like so they have all these these techniques and a lot of that shit happened to Obama too like that whole thing uh when General Mcccrystal went on the news and said like went spoke directly to the press and was like we need all of these troops here in afghanistan and i haven't even had a conversation with the president and then it was like oh all the republicans get on him like but he's not even talking to the generals on the ground and they need all these troops and then obama's like fuck i guess i gotta send all these troops and so they have ways of like just putting political pressure on guys where you know what i mean they don't even really necessarily have to threaten them but then also by the way i don't know they also might be threatening them could you imagine that day that first day in office

you're like what did i do why did i do this you probably think immediately like oh i probably shouldn't do this you know like so many times when guys are fighting like uh they'll like the day of the fight they're like why am i doing this why am i fucking doing it i don't know i don't even want to do this anymore like they say that the day of the fight and then they go in there and they win they feel great yeah or they lose and they i was right but that that feeling of like um what the fuck did i do shit, oh, what the fuck did I do? Shit, I'm here. What the fuck did I do? And there's no getting out of it now. And the stress.

The stress of the whole world. The whole world. I mean, Biden's probably pretty removed from it because he seems kind of out of it. And also he seems like he's got a very strong ego. Like very strong belief in himself in some weird way. You know, I mean, I think Biden, you know, I don't know. With Obama, it aged him so much. With Bush, it aged him so much.

Trump, not so much. Not hardly at all. Although it was only four years. Because I think Trump's ego actually like, I remember one time Bill O'Reilly was interviewing Donald Trump. I always thought this was like an interesting insight into who Donald Trump is. But Bill O'Reilly asked him this question. He was kind of like, he was like, do you ever just like, you know, walk around at the White House and you're just like, wow, this is just unbelievable that I'm at the White House.

Like I'm the president of the United States and I'm in the White House. And Trump goes, yeah, it's a nice house. Like it was just, it was just such a like, it was like, yeah, I don't know. This is right about where I should be. Like my house is a nice house. This house is a nice house. Like, it was just such a, like, it was like, yeah, I don't know. This is right about where I should be. Like, my house is a nice house. This house is a nice house. Whatever. Do you know how many years he was watching the machine?

Trump? How many years? Yeah. Yeah. How many years he was involved? He was watching for a long time. You know, when he talked about how he had to donate money to Hillary Clinton for her to show up at his wedding? Yeah.

Like, that kind of shit? Yeah. No, he was rubbing elbows with all of those elite people. He was watching the machine forever. Yeah. It wasn't until he talked shit about Obama being from Kenya. That's what set the whole buffoonery into motion, right? Because then people were mocking him.

And Obama mocked him. Remember? He did the White House press correspondence dinner. And he said, here's one thing that I am that you'll never be, President of the United States. You see Trump in the audience going, hmm, hmm, hmm. You're taunting a psycho. You're taunting a psycho. Yeah, he taunted him.

And Trump was, the one thing that Trump is truly a genius at is like he's like a genius level self marketer. Oh, yeah. Like and it's all like instinctual, you know, like he's like it's not like he like intellectualizes it. He just kind of like knows he knows how to make himself the center of the story. He knows how to like say the thing that will get the reaction out of people. And that turned out to be an incredibly useful skill in campaigning. Oh, yeah. You know, like he applied that to campaigning and then it just took off and he also you know he tapped into something even with the like even with the birth certificate stuff with with obama which i think is all goofy

you know but he tapped into like the level of distrust that people had in this government and the and the level that they knew how much everyone was lying to them that they were will even willing to entertain this really big lie much everyone was lying to them that they were even willing to entertain this really big lie could have been told to them maybe this whole thing's a fucking lie you know it's kind of like i think this has been building up throughout the 21st century in america and this is why there's like things like you know and on both sides the russia conspiracy stuff the q anon stuff even back to like a 9-11 truth or like loose change and stuff like that. People are very when there's so many lies being told by powerful people, people are very open to the idea that they're lying about a whole bunch more stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's one of the things that's most dangerous about finding out that intelligence agencies are involved in censorship. finding out that intelligence agencies are involved in censorship because it makes people even more suspect to propaganda, more suspect that they're going to less likely to trust the government now than ever before. And the rise of a far right candidate is more likely now, I think than probably ever been before. Yeah. I think that someone, some no nonsense person that people can get behind? Yeah, well, sometimes... You know, like, sometimes I'll see, like,

the most insane of, like, the woke shit. You know, like, whatever it is. You'll be like, you know, it's like some, like, you know, drag queen giving a lap dance to, like, a six-year-old or something. Right. And you're just like, this is, like... It's like, my first thought is, like, this this is the most outrageous appalling thing i've ever seen and

then my second thought almost like right not even second it's like that's one and then one a is like oh my god we're gonna live under a right-wing dictatorship because man i am the most just freedom liberty loving person and it's it's like you're trying to turn me into a right wing like dictator. Like you see this stuff and you're like, oh my God, the reaction against this is going to, and this was the thing that Jordan Peterson like initially warned about. If you remember when he first was those videos where he was arguing with those social justice warriors out there and he goes, you are poking something and you have no idea what you're poking.

You have no idea what the response to this is going to be. And that's still a big concern. Yeah, and people, when they have an idea in their head, like this progressive ideology that they think is so important that it needs to take over the world, they're trying to indoctrinate people. And it must be imposed on other people's children. And these people have control of a lot of the big tech corporations,

which is wild. Like the ethics of that particular ideology. And a lot of the big tech corporations, which is wild. Like the ethics of that particular ideology. And a lot of the public schools. Yes. You know, that's like a thing. I remember, you remember when the Justice Department called those angry parents terrorists? It's crazy. Well, but there's almost like

two things to it, right? There's like one, at first you're like, well, that's crazy, right? That's insane to call them terrorists. But then the second part of it, you're like well that's crazy right that's insane to call them terrorists but then the second part of it you're almost kind of like you know i kind of get it because there is something i do remember seeing some of those videos and the anger in these parents you know but it's like that's the thing you know like i'm like uh it's like i'm i'm lucky enough i got little kids and i'm gonna keep them away from all this stuff. Like I'm able to do that. But a lot of people aren't in that situation. And like their kids are in these public schools and they have no other option. You know what I mean? Like they pay their property taxes. I don't have any more money left over to send my kids to private school. Like this is where they have to go to school. with people's kids, that is, that's something people will do really fucked up shit over.

You know what I mean? Like that's a different line for somebody. Like people can put up with a lot, but like you're gonna brainwash my kid with some ideology that I don't believe in, that I might even hate, and you're gonna like try to brainwash my little kid with that?

It's a dangerous thing to provoke someone with. And to deny that that's a possibility is to – you don't understand humans. Children are very malleable. They always have been. That's how you can get children to be religious martyrs. Like how do you think they talk those kids into strapping themselves up with dynamite and walking into some building and blowing themselves up? They do it through coercion. They teach them.

They can get a person to – you can get a child to ascribe to all sorts of ideologies, hateful ideologies, loving ideologies. People are malleable. We imitate our environment. And particularly children. I mean children are – I mean they do nothing but imitate you. You particularly see this if you're ever around little kids. But my point is it's like this is for good or for bad yes that's not like even though you think you're doing a good thing you're still not doing what

you're supposed to do what you're supposed to do as an educator is teach kids teach kids give them information you're not supposed to be grooming them towards a particular ideology or lifestyle. I don't mean grooming in a sexual. Yeah Yeah, no I mean like schooling them to behave a certain way or to think a certain way or to go against their parents beliefs or to Go against yeah, and if anything like that's Yeah, it's like I'm sorry It's not some government employees job to instill the values into like seven-year-olds like that's on that's on their parents and if their parents are christians or their parents are atheists or if their parents

are left-wing or right-wing that's like they have a right to like try to like you know what i mean like when it comes to sexual issues yeah it's so bizarre it's like and and just doing anything sexual with little kids like any amount of information imagine if you had little kids, like any amount of information like that. Imagine if you had little kids in your class, eight, nine, 10 years old, and you started talking about male and female intercourse. Like people go, what are you doing? Yeah. What are you doing? But there's books that kids can get out of the library in certain school districts that

they've put in there that show like oral sex. Have you seen those? Yeah. Yeah. Seen those books, like oral sex between two males or a male and a female or someone filleting a dildo or something crazy like that yeah like it's it's very very it's so weird it's the wildest shit because like that's not your job if we're talking about purely heterosexual relationships we would all agree that is absolutely not a teacher's job to explain to a child how what kind of sexual

acts males and females like to do to each other that what turns them on like that's like and and one of the things that's really interesting right is that like you and this is what's new about today's dynamic right is that so then you'll see these people like uh in the corporate press or whatever and they'll be like oh none of this is happening this isn't happening at all but it's like no there's a different world now man we have libs of tiktok you know what i mean like everyone here you have this twitter account that just blew the fuck up simply by showing everybody no these are their teachers and this is what they're saying now i'll admit first like when you see those, you don't always get the clearest like perspective of like, wait a minute.

So how many teachers are like this exactly? Right. What schools are they? But regardless, this is a thing that's happening somewhere. And they have a lot of videos of them. So whatever the size of the problem is, it's like, I don't know, there's a lot. And now there's no way you can't convince people that this isn't really happening because we can like see it ourselves. It's right here on video.

How did anybody ever sign off on the little kids drag show? It's so how did anybody imagine again the heterosexual version of that? Imagine a bunch of strippers that are in their 30s and 40s and they're getting young girls to strip and dance for men in the audience imagine imagine imagine if you if you ever saw that that would be a horrendous thing like what are you encouraging like what are you doing to these children why are you taking away their innocence at such an early age but if it's a drag show and you have like a 10 year old drag queen and he goes out there and he's fabulous look at him he's amazing it's like but you're sexualizing this young person you're

still doing something to someone who hasn't even gone through puberty and you're you're they're probably not even interested in sexual activity it's just it's so disgusting what is a fucking 10 year old care about sexual activity but that's what a drug i mean if you're wearing high heels in a skimpy little bikini and you're you're dancing in a certain way we've got to admit what that is like what is that what is that if it's a a girl who's uh built like a brick shithouse well it's very sexual right right if it's the same girl dressed that way moving that way and she has a big boobs and a big ass and all that stuff

It's sex. So if it is it sex with this little kid and how are you okay with and why do you want to do this? Why do you want to watch this and how the hell do we not at least have a consensus amongst about this that's that we're against So crazy, we could disagree on so many issues, but can't we all agree with not sexualizing little kids? But for whatever reason, if you're doing that in an LBGTQ sort of thing, with the drag queen show, they're still doing some of those. They still have where drag queens and little kids are together. What was Cuties? Yeah, that was the Netflix show. It was a Netflix show about children that are like drag queens.

Is that what it was? I think that was girls in Cuties. It was just little girls. It was just girls? It was very bizarre. Which one was the drag queen show? Wasn't there a show that had... Cuties was all little girls?

I think so. Did I fuck that up? Might have to edit that out. I don't want to get sued had the cuties was all little girls? I think so did I fuck that up might have to edit that I don't want to get sued. I Think I think it was so cuties was just young girls. Yeah, I think it was like ten year old girls Just dancing in crazy sexual ways Yeah, and what was it about is it about they would do dance shows. I'll be honest. You're a woman now like what is this? But I remember people got fucking furious at this, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it's just like incredibly little prepubescent girls dancing in the most sexualized ways. But there have been these public, like these things that have been shown publicly that are drag queen shows with kids. Yes, yes. Now, what are those? Are those on film?

That was something I was getting at that. Well, those I think are just things that they have, like just like things that they have at local, like for like Pride Month they had a bunch of them. But there's a different thing between a kid maybe watching a drag show and being involved in it. There's a different thing there. Both kind of weird, but one is much worse. Both kind of weird, worse one is way worse yeah but there have been ones where the kids yes yes no

i've seen i've seen those videos being shared what is that i i don't know what the events were but i have seen those videos it's not just like one thing like there's been a lot of videos of this that have been shared and it is um yeah it's I remember Imagine, like, proposing that to someone Yeah, and it does seem like Drag kids, that's it A daring and touching portrait of four kids chasing freedom and friendship through the art of drag That's it, that was the one So that was on CBC Bro

Just, I mean, that's a really young kid like imagine that young kid okay and what he wants to talk about is how he likes to fuck so he like he has like a rubber girl on stage and she's like this is i like to fuck we can't wait till i'm old enough to fuck that would be so insane that'd be so insane so um imagine why is it like what's going on like if you dress up like a girl then it's okay to be sexualized when you're 10 like is it sexual or is it just performative as a girl it's like it's well there's a million ways to do performative stuff that wouldn't have to be sexualized like just do it in a different way is drag inherently sexual or are we ignorant to it? No, I don't

know, man. I mean, it's not like, I guess theoretically it could not be, but they're not dressing up like Mrs. Doubtfire or something. They're dressing up as like these sexualized characters. That's like what's actually happening. Exactly. They're dressing up in these revealing outfits and they're like little dresses

with, they show their legs right yeah it's like it's so goddamn weird i don't know how this stuff took off but then there was you know i was i was already i said something about this like when this stuff was was coming out and i got people like giving me pushback and stuff where there's like people on twitter and stuff who were like uh who were like oh but i bet you wouldn't have a problem you know i was like oh there's this six-year-old at this drag show or something like that. And they're like, oh, I bet you wouldn't have a problem, you know, bringing your six-year-old to Hooters. And I was like, well, first off, I wouldn't bring my six-year-old to Hooters because I do think that's kind of inappropriate.

But second off, it's not nearly as inappropriate. It's like there's just levels to this. Like, no, if the girls in Hooters were in thongs and giving lap dances, yes, that would be just as inappropriate as this. And even Hooters. I probably wouldn't bring my little kids to Hooters. That does seem a little weird. Why are you going to Hooters? Just seems weird. That'd be a weird thing. I really want to be there with my

young... I wouldn't want my daughter to see... Yeah, like that's just like... That's a weirdo move. Even if it wasn't gross, it would be a weirdo move. They don't want to go there. This is so bizarre. Beer and it wasn't gross. It would be a weirdo move. They don't want to go there. This is so bizarre. Beer and wings and people screaming. Girls are wearing scantily clad

outfits. That's not thought to be a family environment anyway. That's a dumb suggestion. They'd always come up with this thing. What about this? What about child beauty pageant shows? I'm like, I find those weird. I find them very weird and creepy. Joey Diaz, Duncan and I, maybe it was Ari. Anyway, we were in Dallas and we're staying, we're doing the Dallas improv and we're the Addison improv. We're staying at this hotel

that had a drag queen show. No, excuse me. A child beauty show. We're staying at a hotel that had a child beauty show. I want to differentiate, but not by much. So we're walking around the hotel and there's these little kids with high heels and they can barely walk and they're wearing skirts and they're just full clown makeup, crazy hair. And I'm like, bro, this is strange. Why would you do this with your kids? I think it was, I'm pretty sure it was Duncan. I remember us talking about it. We were like, this is so bizarre.

And by the way, of course we were high as fuck. High as fuck. bizarre and by the way of course we were high as fuck high as fuck wandering through this hotel while those these little kids that are dressing up like fox news ladies yeah you know those like super hot fox news lady outfits that's like what they're wearing so they're not dressed up like strippers but they're dressed up so bizarre biz are biz are first of all it's bizarre the sexualization of the female frame in a Professional setting as opposed to male if a male got on television with a with a sleeveless shirt Yeah, we're showing his the center of his pecs and showing most of his legs Except for what I called a leg with Megyn Kelly, a vagina curtain.

I go, it's not even a good curtain. It's like that one that the windows always open in grandma's kitchen. It's a tiny little thing that covers these long, beautiful legs. And you see her toes

and her feet and her legs are crossed because if she opens her legs up, you're basically seeing a thin shield over her vagina. She's a pair of panties. That's it. It's nuts.

And that woman's now going to tell you the news. That one's going to tell you the news. The ambassador to Afghanistan said that the losses have been insurmountable. Like, what? What is happening here? Why would we do this? Yeah, it's so weird. And I like the way it looks, and I'm not opposed to it. No, I don't get me wrong

I'm glad women dress like that. It looks great. Don't get me wrong, but it's just so strange if a lot of it's strange I'll tell you it not in the sexualized way at all But this is another thing that I find very bizarre that I always judge is the guys like in the the cable news things who dye color their hair and get work done and stuff like this. And you're like, you're a fucking newsman, I thought.

What are you doing? They don't know what looks old. Wouldn't it be better if you had a little gray in your hair? You should look old. I'm not trying to fuck you, dude. I'm trying to get the news. That's the idea.

Why do you care about what you look like? They have vanity. They're on TV every day. see they're not news they're like they're like celebrities or whatever they're people who read teleprompters all you have to do is be a good orator you just have to be reasonably good to look at and you know your voice doesn't suck yeah you know or you know and you're willing to say the thing that they tell you to say or you fit into like what they're looking for whatever it's a right-wing show or a left-wing show you know there's like a fucking thing they're looking for whatever it's a right-wing show or a left-wing show You know there's like a fucking thing They're looking for the thing that they think is gonna sell to their people just tell the people what we tell you to tell them

We'll put it up on the screen. Can you read okay? Let's do a dry run here you go go, and then you do it You got it, okay? All right here we go and you're live and then you say it and then that's what you do You know it's like They're actors in a way. They're just they've chosen to act in this manner And this is you know, this is the role the role is I am a right-wing pundit the role is I am You know MSNBC anchor. That's the role. Yep. That's what's so crazy at least for the vast majority of them There are a few exceptions of people like some somewhat good, but it's unbelievable how many are there. But the position is clearly established, and it's

segmented by advertisement to make sure that nothing ever gets too deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's just more, and I think Noam Chomsky went over this back in the day, but how the advertising just gets longer and longer, and the segments get shorter and shorter, and just what they're saying gets dumber and dumber.

It's really unbelievable. It's all pharmaceutical ads now. When you watch, it's all pharmaceutical ads. Yeah, there might be like a Boeing commercial in there somewhere. Every now and then they're throwing like an Oreos commercial. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how you eat cookies or something. Yeah, pharmaceutical, because we just care about your health.

But have an Oreo, by the way. It's so nuts. And it's like you see a stampede just headed towards a cliff and you're like, how do we slow everybody down? How do we make this sustainable? How do we realize that we are temporary beings? are somehow involved in these squabbles with places that are nowhere near us, with people that we have never met. And somehow or another, we are inexorably tied to these activities that are taking place on the other side of the world. And particularly the fact that they pose no threat to you and that you're a part of the biggest, baddest, most powerful society that's ever existed. And they're a part of like these very weak vulnerable societies and yet you're convinced but this is what i say i think the ultimate like like optimistic thing

is that all trust in all of these institutions is completely evaporating and there's something you know a lot of people a lot of people talk about how like um we need to like unify the country and like we're so polarized and wouldn't it be better if we were more united which i understand like the the idea of that but if i go i go i think the most united times in in my lifetime the time the country was the most united was right after 9-11 where like everyone was really together yeah and then the politicians just exploited that and gave us the patriot act and the war in iraq and the war in afghanistan and this whole disastrous you know start to the 21st century and then i actually think everyone was pretty united when COVID first came.

For a little while. And it was like 14 days to flatten, 15 days to flatten the curve. Okay, we'll give you guys a couple weeks. And then the politicians exploited that and just took advantage of the whole thing. So it's like there's real weakness to being united. Maybe it's better at least if we're united, let's be united in not trusting any of the institutions. Well, again, they suck at everything. They're going to suck at this too.

They're not going to make decisions that are good for all of us. But this is to me basically the libertarian argument is that it's like we don't suck at everything. The free market, voluntary people, we actually do amazing things. We do so many things so well, but everything the government touches, they're terrible at, or they're really good at it, but it's incredibly evil. Like we're really good at slaughtering people. It's like, that's true. You are very good at that. Yeah. They're pretty good at that. And they get better at it every year. Yeah. What's the defense budget? Like what's, what's the amount of money that's involved

in these decisions? I mean, I think I'm fucking crazy on the books. I think it's like 700 billion dollars. But if you look at all of the things that are also basically part of it, it's over a trillion dollars a year. Is there a way to redistribute that money to make it so that like they can make that kind of money cleaning up cities? Each year, federal agencies receive funding from Congress known as budgetary resources. Each year, federal agencies receive funding from Congress known as budgetary resources. In 2022, the Department of Defense had $1.77 trillion distributed amongst its six subcomponents. Agencies spend available budgetary resources by making financial promises called obligations.

$1.77 trillion. It could be in one of the six, but the nuclear program is not part of the Department of Defense. It's part of the Energy Department. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that cost isn't even included. Look at that number, though. $1.77 trillion. Is that right? That's in 2022.

The Department of Defense had $1.77 trillion distributed. Yeah, see, I think that's more what I was thinking. That it would be somewhere at $700 billion something. But then if you take into account what Jamie was talking about, the energy department, like nuclear maintenance and stuff. But regardless, I mean, it's an insane amount of money. Whether it's $777 billion or whatever the fuck it is, that is so much money. Yeah. And you notice, and the funny thing is, like, we war in Afghanistan and like the budget doesn't even go down.

It's like you end a war and they just find other things to spend the money on. And if you have that much money being distributed in one year, imagine just cutting that off. Well, yeah. I mean that would be something. But honestly, even just cutting it off i think would be overall like an overwhelmingly good thing but could you imagine the pushback you know what do you think would go down what do you think would go down if someone actually tried to cut that off first of all you can never cut it off totally you have to have some support of the military well yeah but i mean so

what's the budget well look even if the budget was zero next year we still have the most powerful military in the history of the world. Right, but then you've got to pay people to run it. There's going to be some maintenance or something like that, sure. But let's just say hypothetically, I mean, look, we spend more than I think the next 13 countries combined or something like that on our defense budget. So let's just say we cut it in half, hypothetically. something like that on our defense budget. So let's just say we cut it in half. Hypothetically, I think you probably my guess is like, yeah, there'd be enormous pushback from all of the special interests who are losing their money.

So in other words, the only way it could work is if someone like let's say the person who won the presidency won by running on. I'm going to cut the defense budget and got overwhelming support for it. Because then if there was so much support for it, it could be kind of like no matter how much you push back, it's just not going to matter. That being said, I don't really think there's going to be a centralized federal political solution. I think what's much more likely to happen in this country is that this system is going to fail and fail and fail more. And hopefully at that point, you get more and more decentralization and just like, like different areas are going to

like not follow federal guidelines and things like that. And just kind of like, cause I just don't see it. Like to your point, there's so much entrenched powerful interest in Washington, DC. It's very hard to see someone rolling it back from there without a huge movement behind them. I hate to end on a bummer, but there's no way to get out of this. Well, no, I mean, there's just a bummer. Well, that alone, just that number alone, whether it's the $777 billion or the one point whatever trillion, that's so scary, dude. Yeah, but such an enormous amount of money but the

the the thing that's not a bummer is that it's like yeah dude like dude this show gets more like people listening to it than all of these shows that aren't talking about but i'm saying that's that but that's and it's not just you i mean you're like kind of the biggest one but there's so many of these podcasts now that lap, you know, CNN in terms of the people listening. And there are all of these really, there's all these really smart people having really interesting conversations all over the place. And it seems to me like I'm really encouraged by the fact that there's like a big appetite for that. It's like, people don't just want this dumbed down shit that CNN is giving them. People want really interesting

conversations. And as long as that's the case, that gives me at least some hope for like people waking up and at least hope for like people waking up and at least more and more people waking up. I think more and more people are waking up, but it takes a long time to truly grasp the depth of all this chaos. And just you laying it out today to me, not just like enlightened me in some ways,

but also refreshed my understanding of how fucking crazy corrupt the whole United States scheme has always been. Yeah. You know, it's just, but the people of the United States are fucking pretty awesome. Like, there's some amazing people that come out of this country, and there's some amazing minds and amazing art and amazing thoughts, but it's just stuck in a system that's extracting money by being cunts.

Yep, yep. And it's been that way for a long time, and to try to change it now, phew, boy. Yeah, it's daunting, but, you know, this is America. We don't have any choice, so we got to try. Yeah, if we don't, that's it. I mean, if this place goes down, like someone was talking, I think it was Maxine Waters

was saying that we had to have, see if it's her, she said that we had to have a digital currency to compete with China. Yeah. A centralized digital currency is so fucking scary, people. Yeah. Because if they are controlling the numbers, like if it's not banks and it's not it's not fiat currency which is bad enough fucking bad enough but digital is much scarier digital controlled by the government connected to a social credit score because that's the ultimate

goal because then they've got you locked in it doesn't matter what the fucking Constitution says. It's the Bill of Rights. You are not in compliance, Dave Smith. If they can shut you off like that, that's a scary thing. And look, even without the digital currency, you saw what Canada did with those truckers, those protests. Look at this. U.S. lawmakers looked to digital dollar to compete with China. Yeah, to compete with dictators, you got to become one. Yeah, there you go. This is a fucking bet.

Maxine Waters, she said it. Yeah. And meanwhile, like who's fucking telling her? Who's in her ear saying this is a great idea? Ms. Waters framed the competition over new forms of central bank money as a new digital asset space race. The Biden administration and the Fed don't share a sense of urgency. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

If you let them control the money, if you let them have all the ability that they would want if they had something like this, which would be to tell you when you can and cannot spend money. Especially, look, Visa has announced that they're going to separately classify gun purchases. So if you're a person with a lawful firearm license and you decide to purchase a handgun for home protection, now you can't do it through Visa without it being labeled in a different way. And I'm so glad you brought this up too, because this is what they do right there with this whole game where it's like Maxine Waters said this. Joe Biden isn't so sure about it.

They put these things out there and they test what's the resistance to this. It's like they dip their finger into the water to see what the temperature is. It's like, oh, can we get away? And if they can't, then they pull back and then maybe try again later. So it's really important for people. This is such a big thing to fight against. Do not let the government, as bad as fiat currency is, and we'd be so much better as a country if we were on some type of like hard money, sound money system backed by gold or something that limited how much the government can print. But man, this, if they can just turn off your money, we're going into like a real dystopian nightmare.

Yes, that's what I'm scared of. I'm scared of that more than anything because I'm scared of people thinking that, you know, they'll get it connected to some sort of social justice issue. They'll get it connected to some sort of social justice issue. They'll get it connected to some sort of cultural war issue. And next thing you know, you're a supporter of this, that, or the other thing, if you don't agree with letting the government have those kinds of powers and rights. And that's what's scary about them having the power to tell you to do anything, including medical interventions, including anything, anything that they tell you to do. They're not telling you to do for your best interest. They're telling you to do because there's some sort of a financial benefit to doing it that way.

If there wasn't, they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it. Yeah. No, that's right. These people are not motivated by what's best for the common person. I think that's pretty clear. No. None of them are.

And that's the grossest part about the whole race. It's like you want – that's why everybody settles for the lesser of two evils. Like who the fuck is going to fix that whole chaos of corruption and the momentum at all as you've described? As we go all the way back to 1964, 65, go to Vietnam, you go to Kennedy assassination. Take it back to 1913, the creation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax and all this stuff. And, yeah, the only way to do it is to really abolish as much of this government power as possible. But, again, that's easier said than done. You've read Smedley Butler's Wars of Iraq.

Oh, yeah. That was like, what, 1933? That was the attempted coup thing was, yeah, in 32, 33. And when did he write War is a Racket? He wrote it when he was retiring, right? He, yes, he wrote that when he was retiring and he was involved in the military, I think in like the late 1800s. But the story of the coup is from the 30s. Who is from the 30s? It says, War is a Racket is a speech in a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.

Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. We'll just read a little bit of that and then we'll just close this out. Click on that. Just click on the speech because it's pretty fucking crazy what he actually says. Yeah, it's incredible. He talks about how, you know, when he was serving, he thought what he was doing was one thing that it turned out to be something else. It's not a very long book or a long speech. Is there a speech?

Well, there was a YouTube video of the audio there. There it is. You can read. Just click on that. They're an hour long. No, no, no. Just click on that image in the upper right-hand corner. Scroll up and click on that.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It's the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great quote, man. That's a great quote.

And that's by a guy who's seen it all. Yeah. And he's at the end and he's like, listen, this is a racket. Yeah. It's a great, by the way, people should go look into Smedley Butler. It's a really incredible story. That's a great, by the way, people should go look into Smedley Butler. It's a really incredible story that's all real and hard to believe.

Dave Smith, you're a fucking national treasure. Ah, dude, thank you so much, man. Appreciate you very much. Dude, I always have such a great time.

Thank you. All right, bye everybody.